UnexpectedGuest

The Profilux is mine \o/
So, instead of choosing a Profilux 4 for my two aquariums, I finally bought two Profilux Mini WiFi: it's cheaper and I won't have cables running all over my living room.


For the moment, I have installed only one and here are my first impressions:

• The network configuration of the Profilux Mini is quite painful. Yes, I, the man who juggles with IP and subnets, suffered. The Android application forgot to be user friendly and only those who paid for their box will go through with it. Veni, vidi, vici, passus sum.
• Of course, the pH probe has to be calibrated, and reference liquids are not provided. I still haven't figured out how to display the measurement history but I'm still looking, I hope I'm less stupid than the average person.
• The measurement status display portal is accessible via http on the local server of the Profilux Mini and on the myGHL portal.
  
  But in both cases ... no REST API of course. So I'll have to parse the web page like a pig, and the naughty one weighs 13MB . Who said optimization?
• Let's say that the pH probe (after manual calibration) is much more accurate than the 10€ one on Amazon. So my water finally has a pH of 8.13 instead of the 8.8 previously measured. Not very serious, it's in the minimum but still acceptable values for a Tanganyika biotope.
  
  So now I'm going to play with my friends curl, grep and awk to find my hidden pH and temperature values in my web page.
  And only when it's working I'll be able to insert all this inside my beautiful Banana Pi dashboard.
  As we say in French j'ai du pain sur la planche, which could be translated into I have a lot of work to do.
  Stay healthy, stay happy :)

Remember Diana Louise Walstad's promise? A low-tech aquarium, without filters or water changes. I tried it and although the plants grew very well and only a few shrimps were running around, the nitrate levels were hopelessly too high for them.
So I decided to put a filter in this little aquarium.
But shrimps don't like filters, at least not the suction they cause. Basically, the newborns are sucked in and killed by the classic filters... So the shrimp specialists all use air filters with a big foam. But... air filters mean air pumps mean noise pollution, and I try to keep the sound pollution in my living room to a minimum, so I want to avoid at all cost the sound of a membrane vibrating like crazy.
So, first step, find a foam filter that is not air powered, but directly equipped with a water pump, so that it is quiet by design. Not trivial, but you can find one without having to fiddle with an air filter by adding a water pump. I chose this model, it works very well (as long as we forget to talk about the electric plug which is not in the French form).
The second step is to have a better nitrate treatment than the one achieved by the foams alone: this is where this Seachem product comes into play (I didn't trust the provided filtering material). It's expensive but it works devilishly well.
So here I am with the couple :

Verdict: in a few days, my nitrate level dropped to almost zero, all with zero decibels.
Be safe.

Here we go again for a new confinement, so I went back on my word.
I said "No shrimps in the nano aquarium before two months".
I lied.
Since the nitrite and nitrate levels were ridiculously low, I only waited two weeks before populating this aquarium.
And so I have new friends who will confine with me, ten Red Cherry shrimps. There will be no fish in this tank (just a few snails for cleaning), if ever the shrimps decide to breed.
For the moment, the plants are growing well and the shrimps are very active, and surprisingly, not shy at all.


Otherwise, I finally received my other aquarium, the 190 liters Juwel.
I am waiting for the Tanganyika sand before pouring some water in.
And as I will never manage to catch the Neolamprologus Multifasciatus of my big tank, I think that for this specific tank I will start with a slightly different species: Neolamprologus Similis, I like their bluish tone and the way their stripes go to their eyes.
And yes, it will be a specific tank, I clearly made a mistake by putting my Multifasciatus in the community tank...

May you always find water and shade.
(This could be a shrimp saying)

I ordered my new aquarium quite a while back, but I was told that because many people suddenly wanted to try this hobby (as a COVID19 side-effect I guess), I have to wait for it to be built, and the queue is long.
So while waiting for its delivery, I was loitering on Foo the Flowerhorn's YT channel, and ... that's how it all began :)
Next I was buying and reading Diana Louise Walstad "Ecology of the Planted Aquarium", and then I decided I wanted to try having shrimps at home.
Foo, Diana Louise, thank you, I just spent my week-end building a cabinet for my brand new 30 liters aquarium.
This one wont' be connected to my water inlet and a waste water outlet, so Diana Louise have to be true about the 'no regular water change needed', because I'll have to do the water changes the old way, ... by hand.
And I'll go for Foo's wise advice:

No livestock, only the plants, for the first 2 months

This leaves me some time to find out which shrimps will live in this tank.

So, this is what it currently looks like on a 11.6" display (the pen's here for scale purpose):
Otherwise:

• I like this tree view better
• All blocks have dedicated refresh times
• Aquarium values are still fake, no Profilux yet
• Will also track here my water pumps maintenance dates, no more 'Oooops, I forgot!' excuses
• Upload to UG.com is up&running, some PHP skills will be needed now in order to display nice curves here
• Perhaps I'll fill the still empty space with some local weather forecast, there are some nice free API such as https://api.met.no/

Have a nice one.

I hadn't planned to write a post about my Cichlids today, but after hours spent trying to get Tortoise Git to work with my Synology Git server (with relative success), I'm getting my mind off it.
So a little word about the inhabitants of my Tanganyika tank (2m/6.6ft length, 1000l/220gal), after all, this quest for the ultimate pH and always clean water is for them. Yes, my tank is supposed to be a geographical one, but you will see below that I took some liberties with this rule. Shhh.
So, what's swimming in that big tank?

Neolamprologus Leleupi (about 10)
The ones I thought were bright yellow before visualizing them next to the Caeruleus, so they are rather orange after all. Lively, peaceful, pleasant hosts even if no visible reproduction for the moment.

Neolamprologus Multifasciatus (8)
The little one who loves snail shells! (even if I only provide him with snail shells from Bourgogne. And even if I am French, I will never eat such a thing). They may be scrappy, but these fish are finally too small compared to the other species in my tank, it's my fault I thought that my ground surface would be sufficient so that they could reserve a space for themselves. This is more or less true, but they remain confined around three shells in a corner. This is my alibi to buy another aquarium for them in which they will be comfortable :) Some fry still managed to survive, but I could never catch them, my tank is too deep (or I have too short arms).

Julidochromis Regani (about 20)
Discreet, they often reproduce and I have already counted at least three litters of which five or six fry have managed to exceed the critical size.

Cyphotilapia Gibberosa (4)
They are theoretically a male and three females, though it's too early to say because they are too young to reproduce, even if they are already a nice size. And later, nobody will bother them :)

There are also intruders in my tank, in the sense that they do not come from Tanganyika :

Labidochromis Caeruleus (about 30)
It is also an African Cichlid, but it comes from Lake Malawi, so it is very close to its cousins from Lake Tanganyika. These Yellow Labs breed like rabbits in my home, the eight adults have given birth to more than twenty fry that have survived beyond the centimeter. They are very active, even ... boring with the others. A real Mbuna after all, I can't say I wasn't aware of it.

Ancistrus Dolichopterus (about 15)
They're ugly, but I like them. And they took advantage of a pH of around 7 when they arrived to make a dozen fry that grew well. Yes, that's a lot of people ...

As an unexpected consequence of all these Cichlids in front of my dining table, I've never eaten so much shrimp. I buy some every week, and it's always the same ritual: one for the cat, one for the fish, and the rest for me. Do you like shrimp? Raise Cichlids.

Next time I'll talk about my water pumps. Yes, you really have to be an aquarium lover to enjoy reading posts like this :)

Things are coming along nicely with my monitoring project:

One can already find there:

• Minimal Banana Pi monitoring infos (top-screen block),
• Netatmo infos collected via API call ('HOUSE' mid-screen block),
• Future place holder for Aquariums data ('AQUARIUMS' bottom-screen block). Currently fake data is displayed, ain't ordered the Profilux yet :)

Next steps :

1. Upload data to this very server, in order to provide a Web public display,
2. Get a bigger screen for my Banana PI, my current 4 inches is way too small for me :)
3. Begin the Profilux adventure.

What?
Aquarium plural is Aquaria?
Sorry, that hurts my french ears too hard, so I'll stick to the Aquariums form.

What bis?
Why a console version, no nice graphics?
Yep, my Banana Pi's a small thing, I wan to keep it w/o a graphical desktop environment.
And I do like its root look&feel this way :)

News will follow when I have new things to show. See ya.

A few years ago I bought a Banana Pi.
Never heard of it? It's a Raspberry Pi clone, but with at least one killer feature: a SATA interface. So, no more SD card ever lasting i/o, welcome to the SSD performances. Not that I need those performances, but I've always been worried about the lifespan of an SD card used as an OS storage.
I never went that far using my Banana Pi, mainly because the official distributions were unfriendly and outdated. But when I discovered Armbian, all those problems vanished. Armbian is an up to date robust and well documented 'Minimal Debian based Linux with powerful configurator and software installer'. And it's true :)
I'm thinking about automating the temperature and pH monitoring of my aquariums, with appliances like GHL ProfiLux 4 aquarium controller. This little but expensive jewel comes with an embedded web server. I would like to publish on this web site the result of this monitoring, but not only, I'd also like to add things like in house temperature and pressure, in order to have a complete view.
Having no ProfiLux yet (still saving €), I started playing with what I already have: my Banana Pi and in house data from my Netatmo weather station. This device has a public API and I found scripting the retrieving of my data quite simple.
So in a matter of hours, I managed to install Armbian on my Banana Pi, read Netatmo's API and write a small Tcl script that collects my data on demand.

Actually I'm quite happy with the result:
Next step? Put the results in a database (yes, I know, I wanted a flat CMS to avoid databases, just to find myself needing one a few weeks later), and periodically send them to this public server. Yes, my Banana Pi will remain local only, the world is not ready yet for it :)
And later, build and publish a complete monitoring page with the Netatmo and the aquarium data. No roadmap ;)

Ps: Yes, I know, Tcl is not very trendy. I'm too old for Ruby/Python. A good friend of mine used to say: Tradition is a good thing, though in this particular case I would say One can be sexy without being trendy.