Depth Sensor

The hardware was built directly from the Practical Arduino project, but the source code was almost completely overhauled to handle App Engine and our tank visualization, which you can see in action on the Aquaponics Tracker page.

Figure 1.  Depth sensor PCB.  The differential pressure transducer is bottom right.

Why track depth?  Actually, there are a number of reasons.  As you can see in Aquaponics Tracker, you can combine stock information with the depth to monitor the stocking density during system cycling.  You can monitor the depth for potential leaks, automatically refill the stock tank from a sump tank (due to losses from plant growth, evaporation, etc.) and when paired with pump control, you can prevent overflows and/or cycling too much water.

You can see the schematic for the depth sensor below.  The drawing is nearly identical to the Practical Arduino schematic, but we added the missing capacitor for noise reduction.

Figure 2.  Depth sensor schematic with missing capacitor.

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