I wanted to share a project I’ve recently worked on and integrated into SmartThings. I have a small aquarium in my apartment that I spend a lot of time taking care of, mostly by choice, and just simply gazing upon. I decided that it would be great if I could monitor things while away for extended amounts of time or just check in while in the office. I did some searching and the only real solution was to build my own device. I chose a Raspberry Pi with Pi Cam and a waterproof temperature sensor to get things started. At this point, I have a tiny device attached to the side of the tank logging the temperature to a database and offers a web app to see a live stream from the camera and temperature trends. It’s also capable of taking photos and videos and saving them to the Pi. Every hour any photos or videos are uploaded to Dropbox and removed from the Pi, with nightly backups. Once I had everything up and running I created a few api endpoints to get the latest temperature and snapshot from the camera. With this in place, it was easy to create a device type in SmartThings that would allow temperature monitoring within the app along with easily getting a quick view of the tank on the go! I’m utilizing the integration by getting notifications when the temperature fluctuates too much, incredibly useful! I am also using a quirky pivot power to control a day and night light for the tank, much easier than timers when it comes time to make changes to the schedule. At some point I would like to add a water sensor or water level sensor to the Pi or maybe just a simple Zwave sensor so that I could get an alert if the water level drops suddenly (or because I haven’t made a water change in a long time and it’s evaporated). It has been a ton of fun to build and program, I’ve been thinking non stop of more fun build ideas since I “finished” this. Thanks for reading! I’ll share photos/screenshots if anyone is interested (I’ll have to do them, and of course I’m always busy tinkering with SmartThings).