So, I’ve been messing around with building a monitoring system for my Crystal Pool device. It’s been a fun little project, and I figured I’d share how I went about it.
Getting Started
First things first, I needed to figure out what exactly I wanted to monitor. For me, the key things were the usual suspects:
- Water temperature
- pH levels
- Salt levels (since it’s a saltwater pool)
- Pump status (on/off, speed)
I grabbed some sensors that could measure all that stuff. I’m not gonna lie, there was a bit of trial and error figuring out which sensors worked best and were the most reliable. Don’t cheap out too much on these, it’ll save you headaches later.
The Hardware Setup
Once I had the sensors, I needed something to connect them to. I went with a Raspberry Pi for this, mostly because I had one lying around. It’s small, cheap, and powerful enough for this kind of thing.
Wiring everything up was…interesting. I’m no electrician, so it took a bit of Googling and some careful work to make sure I didn’t fry anything (including myself!).
The Software Side
This is where things got a little more code-heavy. I used Python for the software, mainly because it’s easy to work with and there are tons of libraries for interacting with sensors and sending data around.
The basic idea was this:
- Read the data from the sensors.
- Store that data somewhere (I used a simple database).
- Send that data to a dashboard so I could see it easily.
I messed around with a few different dashboard options before settling on one that I liked. The goal was to have something that was easy to read, looked nice, and could show me trends over time.
Putting It All Together
After a few weekends of tinkering, I finally had a working system! It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. I could see all the important pool stats on my phone or computer, and I even set up some alerts to let me know if anything went out of whack.
It is my pleasure to create such a simple monitoring system, I chose to keep the code simple and easy to understand, and it is already good enough for home use.
It’s been a pretty rewarding project. I learned a lot, and now I have a cool (and useful) monitoring system for my pool. Plus, it’s always satisfying to build something yourself, right?