Aquarium maintenance requires continuous water-quality monitoring and disciplined feeding, tasks that are difficult to sustain manually and that often lead to inconsistent care and, in the worst case, to fish stress, disease, or death. This paper presents an IoT Aquarium Management System with Smart Automation that couples an Arduino-based sensing and actuation unit with a Node.js/Express backend and a browser-based dashboard to monitor and control an aquarium in real time. A pH sensor reports readings to the server over a USB serial link managed by the SerialPort library, while a servo-driven feeder performs both node-cron-scheduled and manually triggered feeding. A knowledge-base module, built on the SheetJS (XLSX) library, cross-references each pH reading against a curated Excel dataset to return plain-language health and feeding advice. Historical pH and feeding data are persisted in a local JSON store and rendered as trend charts, and the backend automatically detects and recovers from hardware disconnection. The system was evaluated across sensor accuracy, Arduino communication reliability, feeding operations, dashboard functionality, and reconnection behaviour, with all modules verified to meet their functional and non-functional requirements. In a representative test, a recorded pH of 9.16 was correctly classified as “Very High (Highly Alkaline)” and paired with corresponding ammonia-risk advice, illustrating the advisory module operating on live data. These results show that combining low-cost embedded hardware with a rule-based advisory layer and a lightweight web stack is sufficient to deliver reliable, explainable automation for small-scale aquarium care, and that the resulting platform is readily extensible toward additional sensing modalities and cloud-connected deployments.
 

Internet of Things, Aquarium Automation, Arduino, pH Monitoring, Smart Feeding, Node.js, node-cron, Excel-Based Knowledge Base, Web Dashboard, Embedded Systems