Aquaponics Arduino Email Text Messaging

Background
With all of the lauded benefits of aquaponics, there are a number of drawbacks and they primarily lie in the need for electricity.  Typically there is at least one pump, but if you also use grow lights, water heaters and other electronics, youll inevitably increase possible points of failure.  Wouldnt it be nice if you knew right away when pumps fail, grow lights burn out or dont come on, water heaters die, water temp plummets, a grow bed or fish tank springs a leak or overflows, humidity gets too high/low or the summer sun roasts your greenhouse?

Automation can immediately act to correct some of these conditions but sometimes you dont have a backup pump, grow light or stock tank heater.  Leaks, especially in basement systems, can ruin property if its not addressed quickly.

What you want is a way to know whats going on as it happens and a very good way of doing that is through text message or email.  Thats what this guide is all about and its not unique to aquaponics or hydroponics - it can be used any time the Arduino needs to alert you of a sensor reading.

The Arduino Data Acquisition and Control System (ADACS) projects in Automating Aquaponics with Arduino use the mail API to notify owners of failed/blocked pumps, when environmental conditions move outside of user-defined ranges, and when grow lights fail or dont turn on.  Additionally, youll be notified when the Arduino has failed to connect to the webapp for a set period of time to indicate a potential power loss or loss of an internet connection.  Knowledge of what is happening in your system is the most powerful tool of all and when you combine the Arduino in your aquaponics or hydroponics system, you get an inexpensive means of acquiring that knowledge.

How It Works
Like all of our web-based projects well use Googles cloud infrastructure, App Engine.  Well set up an Arduino Uno with two push buttons, which, when pressed, will send a web request to App Engine and prompt either an email or a text message.  The client consists of a very basic form to collect the designated email address and text address.

Hardware
1 x Arduino Uno R3
1 x Arduino Ethernet Shield R3
2 x Momentary button or switch
2 x 10k ohm resistor
1 x Small breadboard
Breadboard jumper wires

Software
Arduino-1.0.3 IDE
Google App Engine Python SDK: 1.7.4
Python 2.7
Ubuntu 12.04*

*These instructions are probably very easy to translate for Windows or Mac, but as we have neither I cant help you there.

Step 1:  Create a New App Engine Application
The first step will be to create a new application on App Engine.  As all of our web application use App Engine, weve created a standalone tutorial to cover it: Creating a New Application.

Step 2:  App Engine - Configure app.yaml

• The email alerts reside in a file called alerts.py.  We need to add that file to our app.yaml file, Fig 1.

Fig 1.  Add alerts to app.yaml

Step 3:  App Engine - models.py

• In the typical MVC (Model, View, Controller) pattern, we need to create a model of our data, which resides in models.py and is imported to the files that need to access it.
• We have one class to create, the UserPrefs class, which has three properties

1. Time zone offset - not used in this tutorial
2. Email Address - string property
3. Text Address - string property

Fig 2.  models.py

 Step 4:  App Engine - main.py and Templates

• Open main.py and add the import statements, Fig 3.

Fig 3.  main.py import statements

• The first three imports are used to display the templates and run the application.  The users import is used to get the email address of you (the email address you used to create the application).
• models is used is the file containing the UserPrefs data, which we covered in step 3.
• main.py consists of just two classes: MainPage and SaveAddress. You can see MainPage in Fig 4.  

Fig 4.  MainPage class.

• The title of the page is sent to the header template, which you can see in Fig 5.  This is how data can be passed into generic templates, reducing redundant programming.

Fig 5.  The first part of header.html

•  In order to send emails or text messages youll need to provide an address, so we add a very simple form to header.html.  You can see the complete file in Fig 6.  The form consists of two text fields and two buttons.  Each button is given a JavaScript onclick handler discussed in the next step.

Fig 6.  Full header.html file

•  footer.html is a truly uninspiring file and only consists of closing tags

</body>

</html>

Step 5:  Email & Text Messages

A word on email addresses.  The email address you put as the sender must be an email address associated with the account you used to make the webapp.  You can also invite other Gmail addresses to be admins.  The email address you are sending to can be any valid email address.

Text messages can be sent through an email client such as Gmail given you format the address correctly.  Here is a link on the different formats carriers use for SMS and MMS.  We have only confirmed the Sprint format so I will use that as the example.

Sprints SMS email format looks like this:

<your phone number>@messaging.sprintpcs.com

Example:

 

1234567890@messaging.sprintpcs.com

A Sprint user would substitute their phone number in and use this for the text message box.

Step 6: JavaScript and Form Processing

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