I get quite some questions regarding the water household in the new paludarium. When I try to explain, I was always like “wish I had a picture of this”. And now I do!
Introducing “The WaterWorx”
The WaterWorx is a compilation of all water management related things that drive the paludarium. It consists of pumps, valves, tubes, containers, level sensors and things like a reverse-osmosis unit. All of these things are controlled by Artemis, the embedded controller (that is actually Arduino based). The Raspberry Pi on top of Artemis also does some monitoring and higher-level controlling as well. To just drop you an image of the WaterWorx, here it is:
Building out the new paludarium follows two “golden” rules: 1) No tech inside 2) create everything in a modular fashion. Following these rules I came up with the Aeryn module. This module is in charge of one of the most important things for the land portion of a paludarium: Conditioning the air.
Requirements for the Aeryn Module
The Aeryn module should be able to utilize the surrounding air (my living room) and convert that into “jungle-compatible” air. In the early stages of building paludariums I quickly discovered that airflow is the number one factor to influence humidity. Heating the air used to be done by heating the water mass, and the air would more or less follow that temperature. Adding a mistmaker inside the setup would allow for quickly rising the humidity.
In the new setup I wanted to pack all of this (and more) into a single replaceable module: The Aeryn module. These are the requirements I set:
The Aeryn module was designed to allow air to be taken into the paludarium, heated and/or moisturized (mist) before it enters the setup. This is all part of the idea to have “no tech inside” but rather outside for easier access, maintenance and replace with updated versions.
What is Aeryn
Remember the sci-fi series “Farscape”? I originally designed this module named the Aether module. In honor of Farscape I renamed this module to Aeryn 🙂
The Aeryn module is a box-shaped module approximately 60x15x13cm in size, and is inserted into the hood above the paludarium. It lines up with two 12cm holes in the ceiling, where two fans draw in air from the outside. On the end of the module a 40mm pipe leads to the meshed strip on top of the paludarium where the conditioned air gets inserted.
Aeryn section 1: the air intake
The first section of the Aeryn module contains two 120mm fans, RPM regulated (and RPM measured back). These fans are put on top of the module, blowing down into the module. So first the airflow needs to be guided to flow sideways, which is accomplished using a 3D printed guide as shown below:
First section: After the air is pushed in from the top using two 120mm fans, this 3D printed guide directs the air to the left, on to the next sections of the Aeryn module.
After running some tests, today for the first time there was an actual thunderstorm in the paludarium!
How the paludarium figures there should be a thunderstorm
I could have made the weather inside the paludarium choosen by random, but that wouldn’t have been any fun. Instead, the paludarium fetches live data from the La Selva Biological station in Costa Rica.
Using a 1,5 day delay this meteorological data is “replayed” inside the paludarium. Why 1,5 day? Well, one day to Read more »
People are often confused what things are all in the paludarium, what they are called and what they do. In this blog post I’ll explain the different components (sub projects if you will) that make up the paludarium today.
A quick overview
In order to get the paludarium working as it works today, I had to run several different projects and put them all together. First I’ll quickly list all the different components:
The Cabinet – The custom-built cabinets that hold the paludarium;
The Paludarium – The glass structure that holds water and air (the paludarium is a closed construction);
The Land part – The part above water. Filled with tropical plants, and for now no animals here;
The Aquatic part – The front underwater part of the paludarium, where the fish live;
The Sump – The rear underwater part. Any excess water from the Aquatic part is dumped here, and the plants living on the background panel get their water from here (and return it there too);
The Waterworks – The board in the cabinet that holds all the plumbing (water valves etc);
The Canopy – The intelligent armature sitting on top of the paludarium;
PaluPi – A standard Raspberry Pi with an RS232 level converter that sits inside the Canopy and handles all the “smart thinking”;
Apollo units – Named after the god of light, there are around 12 of these units inside the Canopy, each handling up to 4 leds, halogens, TLs or fans;
Neptune module – Still under development, this unit controls all pumps, valves etc in the Waterworks;
Quite a list right? Everything in this list had to be tuned Read more »
One of the last things to build and test with all the water stuff, was rain. So I added a small installation with sprinklers that get fed directly from the tap water.
Rain Down On Me
The rain installation is controlled electronically (duh!). On the WaterWorks under the paludarium, I have one electromagnetic valve that can be opened to feed the rain installation:
The magnetic valves on the WaterWorks. The one on the left controls the osmosis filter, the center one inputs tap water into the aquatic part, and the rightmost has now been connected with a thin black tube to allow for rainfall.
The valve on the right has now been connected as well with a thin black tube. This tube is fed upwards, and Read more »
Today I finally ordered most of the hardware I’ll require for the further construction of the paludarium. Not computer chips this time, but pumps, filters, pipes, heaters and other cool stuff. In this blog post I’ll highlight some of the components that I’ve selected.
Aquatic Filter
Originally I used an Eheim 2222 external filter for Paludarium 1.0. However, this filter was already too small, so for the new Paludarium 2.0 it would definitely be too small, so I was in need of an upgrade. The price of the larger Eheim filters scared me a bit – So I decided to go for another vendor, JBL. They have a much cheaper filter line, the greenline filters:
The JBL Greenline 1501e external filter
I bought their 1501e version, which outputs an impressive 1400 litres per hour and Read more »
As I’ve started to think up Paludarium 2.0, more and more ideas are popping up. The most recent one: How to build the water household. With all the things I want, and all the technology I can build, I am now thinking up the specs and features I need/want, and how I can build them so that it will actually work, and most important, KEEP working.
Specs for the flow of water
I have quite an extensive must have / wanna have list. Here they are in random order: Read more »
[…] to the “C”. Today I still program in both “C” and Python for fun (Arduino and Raspberry Pi […]
[…] I got a phone call that my paludarium was ready for delivery… So I needed to speed up the…
Hi Loek! Kan zeker, misschien wel handig om even te wachten totdat in ieder geval de hardware is opgebouwd en…
Goedemorgen Erik, Ik wil dat graag een keertje live bekijken. Kunnen we een afspraak maken?
Thinking this through... Even if I have 256x WS2818's I'd use 3*256 = 768 bytes of memory for R,G,B... The…
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[…] to the “C”. Today I still program in both “C” and Python for fun (Arduino and Raspberry Pi […]