Five SFU students who joined Tech Entrepreneurship@SFU are making waves with their new fish tank monitor.

Leonie Tharratt, Kyle Tharratt, Spencer Arbour, Kevin Cruz, and Ivan Shchukin joined the program that helped them get their product started.

“This program was invaluable in enabling us to develop our own idea by providing support and funding to us and allowing us to maintain ownership of the idea,” Tharratt said in an email interview with The Peak.

At this phase in development, the device will be able to monitor temperature, ammonia levels, and water temperature. The team plans to develop it to monitor pH, nitrite, and TDS (total dissolved solids).

Tharratt added, “From there we can use an algorithm on the back-end to determine GH & KH trends. All this information is sent to the user’s app and will provide alerts when they exceed the specified acceptable ranges for each parameter.”

The team of students saw a need for this type of monitoring system both from first-hand experience with their own fish and from the experiences of others. Tharratt mentioned a situation in which an aquarium fish appeared healthy, but there was a problem with the water in the tank.

Said Tharratt, “I went to buy a few fish from someone and it turned out that he had none for sale because when he was on vacation his heater malfunctioned and killed everything in the tank. [That] cost him about $1000 in juvenile fish that he was planning to sell.”

Although the team is still in the prototyping and development phase of their project, they are expecting the cost of making their technology a reality to be between $300 and $400. Funding is their last hurdle towards selling their device on the wider market.