So, I’m all for ideas that are sometimes so far out there people might ask “why even go there”. And that’s what leads me down a path I’ve been thinking about with future enclosures.
I’m a hobbyist, and an artist. I want my snakes on full display in not only functional but beautiful enclosures. More akin to a fine furniture piece than a glass box. And I also want the animal to be able to show its most natural state of being.
I already plan to have the temps, humidity and light controlled. Which makes me want to go even further.
So my hair brained idea is this:
Does anyone have enough programming knowledge to make a program that can run off of something like a raspberry pi, or something similar, that can check the weather report of an area of the world and reproduce it in an enclosure.
I know there may not be any great benefits to it. But reptiles are not really suited to just adapting to MN winter conditions, even indoors. So why not give them their “ideal” climate?
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While hypothetically it would be possible, I wouldn’t trust it. What happens if there’s some severe weather phenomenon in the region of the world that you are using as a template for your climate controlled habitat? It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen
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There would have to be some failsafes put in, for sure.
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I think this is actually a good idea if possible. Throughout the day having your temp/humidity adjusted hourly like it would in their natural habitat and place safeguard highs and low parameters just like you do with normal controller. As long as your not trying to mist every time it rains and cause a flood in your enclosure I don’t see anything wrong with it. I would have a mister setup in a high humidity environment set on a timer so your not over running a fogger for humidity.
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As long as you put limits on it so it couldn’t go to extreme temperatures then I think that it would work. You would have to have a constant source for information that the program automatically checks and sets the variables as and then the program would take those variables and sort them into certain instructions so it would tell the thermostat, mister, lights, etc to do a certain task based on what the program found the instructions to be. Also you’d have to tell it when to recheck the source (information on stats in area that you’re mimicking). Do you want to have it so it checks every 10 min, 30 min, every other hour, daily, only when you tell it to.
Back when I was stupid involved in salt water reef tanks, there was a fun product called the ReefKeeper Lite controller. I just checked, and Digital Aquatics has closed shop… But, there seems to be a fair amount of them available still.
One unique feature was that you could feed it coordinates, say a small bay in the Indian Ocean, and it would adjust all your parameters to that locale… sunrise, sunset, expected water temps for that day, & c. It had tons of settings you could control - heaters if it gets cold, fans/chillers, if it gets too hot, lighting, - you name it.
It occurred to me that perhaps you could pick land coordinates for say Australia’s Outback, or an Indonesian island, to get the same results? They were never cheap, but the reef keeping community always seemed to pride themselves on overspending… Ring a bell, anyone? 
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Quick update, as I was closing my search window, I noticed DA also sold a product called HerpKeeper Lite. So, perhaps you all already knew this?
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