A Raspberry Pi Has This Pool Covered

Far from being a tiled hole in the ground with a bit of water in it, a modern swimming pool boasts a complex array of subsystems designed to ensure your morning dip is as perfect as that you’d find on the sun-kissed beaches of your dream tropical isle. And as you might expect with such complex pieces of equipment in a domestic setting, they grow old, go wrong, and are expensive to fix.

[DrewBeer]’s pool had just such a problem. A decades-oldwired controller had failed, so rather than stump up a fortune for a refit, he created his own pool controller which exists under the watchful eye of a Raspberry Pi. The breadth of functionality is apparent from his write-up. In addition to the pump and heater you’d expect, he as a salt water system, environmental monitoring, and even an RTL-SDR to pull in readings from an RF floating temperature probe. It’s all exposed via a node.js API, and thus far has been running for over 6 months without mishap.

From where this is being written in the gloom of a damp November in a Northern Hemisphere maritime climate we can only envy [Drew] his pool and imagine it as perpetually deep blue and sparkling, invitingly cool against the heat of a summer’s day. If you have similar pool automation woes. perhaps you’d also like to look at this ESP8266 pool monitor, or another automation project using a Raspberry Pi.

25 thoughts on “A Raspberry Pi Has This Pool Covered

    1. Compared to the power usage of the salt system, heater, and pump this controller would be a rounding error.

      Had a pool once in a rental property I was leasing. Never again unless I owned the house and I could do something like this with a solar power and heating systems to run it with.

    2. Arduino wasn’t used for a few reasons. i needed to run the node-js pool software, since i didn’t want to rewrite all that pump logic (it’s not pretty), along with the rtl_433 package too.

  1. I assume you have an electric saltwater chlorinator. Just wondering if you had to do anything special with the power to the electrodes to prevent a build-up on the plates? Like changing amps, cycling the polarity etc..

      1. Most salt cell controllers reverse polarity on the plates every 90 mins it is trying to generate chlorine. This helps it not build up scale as quickly. I doubt the SGS breeze is any differant (been out of the pool biz for over a year, but spent 12 years in it).

      1. While a saltwater pool does have a better swimming experience for some. It is just producing chlorine using the salt in the water. So chemicals are still used. Just not getting the byproducts or stabilizers from other chlorine sources. Those chemicals can build up and make it harder to care for the water.

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