ReefLight

I wrote a small python script that allows to control my aquarium lamp via mqtt protocoll. The aquarium lamp is a cheap wifi enabled ESP8266 chip with the mighty ESPEasy Firmware. The Firmware can be used to generate multiple PWM signals using directly the pins of the ESP8266 or by using the I2C PCA9685 board for example.

The python script can be controlled via a webinterface where the daily schedule of the different channels/colors of the lamp can be configured via drag and drop (ipadress:5000/schedule.html). Also each channel can be configured manually (ipadress:5000/).

The settings of the script are stored in the settings.json json file.

It contains an array of the different channel objects if you want to use multiple channels (for different light colors for example). A channel object contains

• name of the channel for displaying in the webinterface
• color of the channel for displaying in the webinterface
• pwm PWM Value of the channel at last update (range 0..1)
• manual
  true: The pwm value is not automatically updated and can be changed in the webinterface
  false: the channel is either in moolight or not in moonlight (regular) mode.
• moonlight
  true: the script calculates at each update the brightness of the moon at your location that can be configured in latitude and longitude in the settings.json file. It uses the fractional phase of the moon and the height of the moon at the sky.
  false: the channels is working as regular channel. At each update it takes the data_points array and interpolates the pwm value using the pwm values of the two data_points greater and smaller to the current time
• data_points Array storing the lightschedule in normal mode (not manual and no moonlight mode). It consists of time value pairs that can be changed using the ip-address:5000/schedule.html

The json file also contains general settings

• mqtt_broker, mqtt_client_name, mqtt_port, mqtt_qos, mqtt_topic MQTT settings
• seconds_between_updates seconds between two successive updates
• longitude, langitude geographic location for the moonlight simulation

The script can be executed either

• directly via python with the required packages in requirements.txt or
• via Docker
  Build the Docker image with docker build -t reeflight . inside the git-repo and start a container with docker run -dit -v /home/pi/settings:/settings -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime --rm --net=host --name reeflight reeflight