AI-based Management of Aquarium stuff is crazy cool [Hydros, EcoFlow, ReefBeat, HomeAssistant]

[richiev]

I am going further and further down the AI deep end. Folks really need to try all the latest and greatest stuff, it is incredibly powerful right now. Far more than it was before. As an aside, I think the "Something Big Is Happening" post is one of the clearest discussions of what's going on right now. In the past couple days I've done technical projects at home that would've taken me weeks to do, some of which I pushed off for years. E.g. in 20minutes today I finally setup my richie@mylastnamehere.name email address, which I'd been planning to do for over 5 years and just never fininshed (though I owned the mylastnamehere.name domain).

Tying this back to aquarium stuff, I've also made major improvements to the dashboards I have for my aquarium within HomeAssistant. HA is pretty powerful, but the management setup is a bit hard to use. It's just difficult enough to do that I don't bother tweaking things, and lived with ugly dashboards.

However, now that I have some AI things running locally at home (openclaw) I went through and configured it to have access to my HomeAssistant. After doing so, I gave it directions on what I wanted to do. An example ask:

I want to create a new dashboard, based around the Water Mixing area. It should have the various devices and the automations.

Within this, I want a new capability. I want to be able to pick how long to run the RO fill. When doing so, I want it to follow a similar flushing mechanism the current RO fills are doing, where it periodically enables the flush for about 5 minutes. Because of that, ignore the previous RO related automations, don't show the ones that are run it for X hours.

For the saltwater mixing, do the same thing as the RO.

Also, let's organize the UI around sections. E.g. I run the RO pieces and then I'd do the saltwater mixing, so let's have 2 separate sections, with some sort of divider between them. Make sure the divider spans the whole view.

I want the dashboard to show the current status of these various core things as important call outs.

I want this to look pretty. Automations should be buttons with relevant icons. Outlets switches in a list.

I want charts of:
* historical TDS value, and where it's unavailable show the last read value. Make sure the summary value for the chart also follows that guidance. Let's color code any TDS < 4 as green, anything above that as red.
* when things like the various pumps and valves were on and off
* a similar view of when the automations were running
* ideally I'd have a layout that showed buttons and historically when they were on and off next to it ala [button] [chart], make sure the spacing will be good even on different size monitors.

I may rerun this with different guidance, so do an in-place edit if the dashboard already exists. Ignore whatever may currently be in that dashboard.

I'd been meaning to do that for a long time, and just never got around to doing so. Now, in a couple minutes of typing and giving it more suggestions, followed by reading reddit while it did it's thing I have this:

Super cool stuff. I think this is another reason not to go Hydros right now, because they have no API. Without an API it's a lot harder to do anything with AI, and in about a year no one will want any tools that aren't AI controllable. I bet it'd be doable to do something like this with Apex. Control what you want your dashboards and controls to be, just using guidance. You can even do this by voice if you want, particularly with tools like Wispr Flow.

 

[richiev]

I let it go to town on my tank dashboards too. Here's what it came up with:

This is way better than the ugly random list I previously had. Also super informative now.

 

[richiev]

I now have AI control of my Hydros!

Hydros only allows access through their browser and mobile apps. That's somewhat annoying to me because I can't integrate it with any of my other things at home. Hydros doesn't expose any sort of API for people to use.

That however doesn't turn out to be a deal breaker for the new AI tools out there. Here's what I asked the AI:

I have a hydros device for one of my aquariums. It has an online interface at https://www.coralvuehydros.com/app/#/login Can you connect and monitor or manage it? There is no API. I can give you the password and login name

In response to that and a subsequent request with me giving it a username and password, the AI (opencrawl, running on top of Anthropic's models), all by itself the AI:

1. inspected the Hydros web app, and discovered the underlying tech it's built on
2. figured out how to login
3. discovered all my hydros inputs and outputs
4. generated me a dashboard in HomeAssistant based on pulling data every 5 minutes, and has access to the same controls as the hydros app

Going further, I had it import all my ReefBeat Red Sea equipment!

Further still, import all my EcoFlow devices!

Furtherest, setup automatic alerts. E.g:

Next setup some alerts. I should get a HA notification whenever the leak detections trigger.
...

next, on the peninsula, I would like an alert whenever the ecoflow reports no power output. Additionally I'd like alerts when:

* it starts using battery backup power. If possible a higher priority alert if the battery power drops below 50%, and include in the alert how much battery is left
* the AC power outlet goes off (warning style alert)
* connectivity drops -- but make sure to only do that if connectivity dropped for at least 5 minutes
...

do the same for the frag tank
...

finally, setup alerts that trigger if the AC output drops to zero. Do a similar 5 minute check as previously

So in the course of an evening, while multitasking with work I now have fancy dashboards showing EcoFlow, Hydros, ReefBeat, Kasa, DiY devices all in one place, and alerts for them. Those alerts will ping my phone and do an email as appropriate. I even confirmed they work by manually disabling my ecoflows and seeing things pop up on my phone.

Mega-mind-blow for me.

I've been doing software for 20 years and what would've taken at least a full time work week is done in an evening.

 

[grizfyrfyter]

IIt gets better. I have an nvidia jetson nano super that has a couple of different 7B parameter LLM Models on it. It can boot specific models at HA request. The HA "assist" on my network is run by the llm, who has access to entities for control and analysis and building AI Tools (repetitive work flows and triggers). Separately, each user gets a ChatGPT style interact to chat with their preferred model (resource limited).

I don't give it access but I'm tinkering with automated "health check" for the Ai to perferm based on triggers, including reviewing camera footage and pattern searching in telemetry