Tracking Planted Aquarium Water Quality
Logging the color of water tests
This is part one of a series to introduce everyone to the capabilities of the Krill Platform using my freshwater planted aquarium as an example. We’ll start very simply with manually logging the color of test kit samples and then go to the moon building a custom color sensor rig, creating reminders and alert, and even connecting Claude to help interpret the results and create dashboards.
Getting Started
One of the primary purposes of the Krill Platform is to connect information from every aspect of a project and combine them into a single view you can observe, monitor, interact with and automate.
If you have a debian based server like a Raspberry Pi running Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu, you can install the Krill Server and start logging data in minutes.
In this post, I’ll share how to record colors that change over time such as in this case, the color of water test kit samples.
What will really bake your noodle is on your journey learning about the platform, how many capabilties there are beyond this such as:
- A Claude Skill and MCP server to connect to the power of LLMs for interpreting data, creating dashboards, and even writing code to interact with your project
- Tools to joural and create tasks with that can trigger anything you want if past due - sound an alarm, turn on a light, send an email or anything else.
- Execute
Related
- CircuitPython Sensors via Lambda — installing Adafruit Blinka, enabling I2C, writing Lambda scripts that read I2C sensors
- Color Data Points and Triggers — the COLOR DataType used for the swatch, and the Color Trigger for RGB-range automation
- Lambda Executor — how Lambda source/target wiring works
- CO2 Reactor with Color Sensor — binary-decision use of the same rig
Draft — last updated 2026-04-26