Get Involved In The Future

Over the past 2 years the ASC Magazine has been delivering a monthly magazine to readers from all over the world. The magazine has grown to the point where we need more help from industry leaders, business owners and the public. 

We have been publishing stories from backyard growers, commercial growers and gardening fanatics. The magazine has also become more interested in publishing white papers and studies from universities, educators and people with experience in aquaponics, aquaculture, agriculture and permaculture. This is something our readers have asked us for so we are giving them what they want. 

We are also including more stories and advertisements from greenhouse manufacturers, lighting specialists, solar panel companies, aquaculture suppliers, suppliers of all kinds of growing equipment and other similar companies. 

The magazine has reached a point where we are now sharing some of what we do with other interested people who want to help us spread the word and make some money on the side. 

We are inviting commercial growers, business owners and interested parties to become an affiliate for the ASC Magazine. 

The ASC Magazine is now offering the following incentives for Lifetime Conversions: 

• The magazine affiliate program will be offered through Clickbank ( a 3rd party verification company.  

• Your percentage of selling the magazine will be sent to you in the form of a check or direct deposit, directly from this company. They will let you know the options available to you.

• We will provide the banners and other tools (if need be) which will enable you to make money.

• The ASC Magazine will make up the pre-made E-Mails if you need help with that.

• The Minimum payout will be $20.00 per conversion of the Lifetime Subscription.

If you would like to learn more please E-Mail Us for more details:  Click Here 

This is a great opportunity to make money and help us spread the word to others. The ASC Magazine is going to keep on reporting the changes, advancements and industry leaders because Aquaponics is set to be one the futuristic businesses by the year 2030 according to Business Insider.

"Aquaponic fish farmer: In 2030, populations of wild fish are disappearing — so new production methods like aquaponics will step in to replace fish that we can no longer catch in the wild. Aquaponics combines fish farming with gardening, where plants grow over water to cover its surface, while fish live below. The plants return oxygen to the water, and the fish produce waste that provides fertilizer for the plants."

Happy Gardening Everyone

Victoria Kelley 

ASC Magazine Editor 

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What is a safe level of ammonia in an aquaponic system?  This question elicits more incorrect responses, confusion and frustration than any other topic in aquaponics.  Why?  Because new growers are not instructed on how to interpret water quality readings together to evaluate toxicity.

Ammonia, when dissolved in water, becomes partially ionized.  The ionized ammonia is called Ammonium (NH_4^+) and is not toxic to your fish.  Non-ionized ammonia, often referred to as "free ammonia" ((NH_3)), is highly toxic in low levels.  From this you need to know two very important things.

1. Of the two most common water quality test kits, neither provide a reading of free ammonia.  Instead they provide a reading of total ammonia nitrogen (TAN), ammonium or both.
2. Free ammonia is a function of (pH), water temperature ((T)) and (TAN).

$$ NH_3(pH, T, TAN) $$
In other words, a free ammonia evaluation requires pH and water temperature in addition to an ammonia reading in order to get an accurate assessment of toxicity - it cannot be determined solely on the ammonia water quality reading. To prevent ammonia toxicity, track and then evaluate (pH), (T) and (TAN) using the calculator below. The question of safe ammonia levels should be interpreted as, "What is a safe level of free ammonia in my aquaponic system?" The free ammonia calculator below uses the following scale, based in part on reports from the EPA:

• Safe:  (0 le FA le 0.019)
• Danger:  (0.020 le FA le 0.030)
• High Danger:  (FA ge 0.030)

Did you find this tool useful?  Let us know in the comments below.
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Finally got back to the farm today after two weeks away. The plants have really taken off and look great. The basil below is the largest Ive ever seen and Ive grown plenty of it over the years to know these are large basil plants.



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Here is the other grow bed with a variety of spices and now several tomato plants along the back. The tomato plants are all flowering so I should have some fresh pickings soon.

Not so impressive are my lettuces and especially the spinach.

I did get my hands on what I am told are tropicalized lettuce, cabbage and cucumber seeds, which have germinated (below). I will probably plant some this week and the rest when I get a floating-raft bed set up.

The fish look great and the tank water is crystal clear. PH is stable at 6.6. Ill probably go to once-per-week measurements on all variables now that the system has stablized. My fingerlings are now considerably larger - will get pictures soon. I should probably move them to the large tank soon as the sump does not have any emergency back-up pump installed.

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This tutorial is based on the Environment DAQ and while it is designed with aquaponics in mind, it does not require an aquaponics system, making it useful for other projects such as hydroponics or home automation. The included application, therefore, is bare-bones, making it easier to integrate into any other application.

How it works
Here we focus on capturing temperature and relative humidity and sending it to App Engine to be visualized using Google Chart Tools. Every sixty seconds, the Arduino will test its connection to App Engine. The return should be “Ok”, which is parsed by the Arduino. If the connection is ok, the bicolor LED is set to green, otherwise it is set to red. If the connection is good, the Arduino will take a reading from digital pin six (the DHT pin) and create a GET request to App Engine. App Engine will query the datastore (its database) for the Environment entity, update the temperature and relative humidity values and put the entity back in the datastore.

On startup, the web browser (client) will create a temperature and humidity gauge with values at zero. It will then make an AJAX request to the datastore which will return a JSON array. The client parses the array and updates the gauges. Finally, it sets an interval to repeat the process, giving you a dynamically updated display.

Final Result.

This project doesnt go into detail on how the webapp is put together or how and where to customize the webapp code, as that takes many, many more pages.  So we wrote a book that delves deeper into this project and others to create a single data acquisition and control system using the Arduino and App Engine.

Software Versions
1. Arduino IDE: Arduino-1.0.3
2. App Engine SDK: Python, Linux, 1.7.4
3. Python: Python2.7
4. Ubuntu 12.04
5. Adafruits DHT Arduino library

Parts List
1 x Arduino Uno R3
1 x Arduino Ethernet Shield R3
1 x Arduino Power Cord (optional, but gets better power than just the USB)
1 x Bicolor LED (Red/Green)
1 x 1/4W 470 ohm resistor
1 x 1/4W 4.7k ohm resistor
1 x DHT22
Breadboard jumper wires
Small breadboard

Step 1 -  Install Adafruits DHT Library

Fig 1.  Adafruit Library

• You can find the Arduino library for the DHT here, see Fig 1.
• Download and extract.  Rename the extracted folder "DHT".
• Copy the folder into: ~/Arduino/arduino-1.0.3/libraries 

Step 2 - Google App Engine

Fig 2.  New GAE Project

• If you dont already have a free Google account, sign up for one.
• Use your Google account to sign up for Google App Engine
• Download the App Engine Python SDK.  The version used here is 1.7.4, on Linux and extract it to your home directory.  In this case, I renamed the folder AppEngine.  If you depart, simply make note of where you extracted the folder.
• In the App Engine Admin Console, create a new project, Figure 2. 
• Take note of your application identifier.  You will need that for future steps.
• Keep the default security settings; we will restrict access to Admin (you) later.

Step 3 - GAE Project Code

• Download the project source code here.
• Extract the tar file in your home directory, it should be called IAquaponics_DHT.  Inside you will find the GAE directory labelled myapsystem and the Arduino folder.  The name of the folder containing the GAE code is irrelevant, so there isnt a need to rename it.  The rest of the instructions will keep the original name.  If you choose to rename the folder, amend the directions accordingly.
• Inside the GAE directory, open app.yaml.  The first line is the application name, so change it to the application identifier you made in Step 2.

Fig 3.  app.yaml.  Replace the highlighted name with your project name.

• Take note of the bottom.  The main page of our webapp is listed last because it will catch all url requests not listed above it.  In fact, this webapp only has two pages: adacs and main.  The former is used by the Arduino and the latter is the visible interface you will see with the web browser (client).
• Finally, under main.app, you will see login: admin.  This app uses Google Accounts as you saw in Step 2, but we are restricting application to the webapp to just you.

Step 4 - Launch the AppEngine SDK with Your Project

• Open a terminal and launch the AppEngine SDK and your project.
  

python2.7 AppEngine/dev_appserver.py IAquaponics_DHT/myapsystem

• If all went well, the terminal will tell you the project is located at

http://localhost:8080/

• So fire up a web browser and point it to that url.  Because we have restricted access to admin, you will need to login as admin.  The login name is irrelevant, but beneath the email input box you need to check the box that says "Sign in as Administrator".  Then login.

Fig 4.  Login as Administrator.

• At this point you should see two gauges that read zero, see Fig 5.

Fig 5.  Initial Gauges.

• Next, we are going to replicate the request the Arduino will make to the live webapp.  In the browser, type in:

http://localhost:8080/adacs/dht?Temp=69.1&RH=24.8

• You will be presented with a page that says "Ok".  Go Back to the main screen and you should be presented with the two updated gauges, like Fig 6.

Fig 6.  Update gauge display.

• Thats how this works.  The Arduino will make requests to the webapp, sending data.  The webapp will save that data in the datastore (its database).  The JavaScript will make AJAX requests (asynchronous JavaScript requests) to the datastore, get the values, and assign them to the gauges giving you a constantly updated display.

Step 5 - Its Alive: Upload the Webapp to App Engine

• If everything has worked for you so far, then its time to upload the webapp to a live server.  Open a terminal and type

cd AppEngine/

./appcfg.py update ~/IAquaponics_DHT/myapsystem

• You will likely be prompted to input your login email and password.
• When the update is done, go to your webapp.

http://myapsystem.appspot.com

• If you are not logged into your Google account, youll be prompted to.  Note the login is consistent for all of Googles products.  At the home page, you should see two zero gauges, just like the SDK.
• To test the live webapp, repeat the replicated call made by the Arduino and return back to the home screen.  You should be presented with two updated gauges.

Step 6 - Arduino

• Wire up your breadboard following the Fritzing diagram in Fig 7.  The Ethernet shield is not shown,  but it resides on top of the Arduino and the jumper wires plug into the Ethernet shield.  The 470 ohm resistor is for the bicolor LED and the 4.7k ohm resistor is for the DHT.

Fig 7.  Fritzing layout of breadboard.

• With that done, load the Arduino file DHT.ino from the project folder.
• You will need to amend the Arduino code to send requests to your webapp.  There are three locations where the webapp link is listed.  Change ONLY the highlighted project name.

Fig 8.  First location.

Fig 9.  Second location.

Fig 10.  Third location.

• Save and upload to your Arduino.
• Open a Serial monitor
• When the Arduino connects, the bicolor LED will turn green.  If there is a connection issue, the Serial output will tell you and the LED will turn red (See Note 1).
• If its not still open, launch a web browser and point it to your live webapp.  You should see the gauges change.  After that, depending on how much your temperature fluctuates, you may not see a noticeable change.
• And thats it.

Notes

1. Since working with AppEngine and Arduino Ethernet we have encountered one consistent error.  The Arduino will fail to make the third request.  The first two are fine.  Every request after the third connects and works, but for some reason the third one will fail, every time.
2. For troubleshooting and development mode, Serial output is on.  Specifically, there are two counters provided, which need to be commented out (using double slashes at the beginning of the line: //).  If you dont, the counter can grow very, very large.
3. There is a flaw in this code.  If the Arduino fails to update AppEngine, your display will not be changed and you wont know it.  Because this is a bare-bones application, our solution wasnt included.  The solution we developed was to save each timestamp of the Arduino request in AppEngine and create a deferred task set to delay for five minutes.  At the end of the delay, the current timestamp was compared to the last timestamp of the Arduino.  If the delay exceeded a certain time interval (such as three minutes), it meant the Arduino hadnt communicated in five minutes (obviously).  At that point, an email or text alert was sent to the owner notifying you of a connection issue and the gauge values were reset to zero.  

You are free to modify the code as you see fit, but I have one suggestion.  Google App Engine allows for daily free quotas, if you exceed the free quotas and dont pay a monthly fee ($9), your app will be shut down.  Two free quotas you should be aware of are instance hours and read/write/small operations on the datastore.  You get 28 free instance hours, reset daily.  The Arduino should not be set to send requests to AppEngine too often, or new instances of your app may spawn.  Similarly, the browser is set to refresh every 30 seconds.  If you combine the Arduino requests with the client requests, and make them too frequently,  you may again spawn new instances.

Read/write operations are set to 50K each and AppEngine is a little funny about how they count these, but needless to say, making a request every ten seconds, all day from both the browser and Arduino will run up a lot of operations.  Try not to go below twenty seconds on both the client and Arduino and enjoy the free quota.

If you have trouble, hit up the comments below.  And if you include this in one of your own projects, send us a pic, wed love to see it.

More projects like this can be found on the Automating Aquaponics with Arduino page.

Related:   
EnvDAQ with Water Temperature Sensor 
Real-Time Graphing Online
Online Relay Control

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