Traditionally in the reptile breeding business, people sit their animals on small, poorly controlled heating pads. Some more savvy breeders will plug them into simple rotary dimmers or rotary thermostats to try to better control the animals temperature. Larger operations will be in a dedicated room kept at a higher temperature than the rest of the house.

As an experiment I made a simple heat controller from an Arduino Uno, a TMP36 sensor, and a relay, to check the heat every 5 seconds and cycle the relay as necessary. This device controlled the heat of a large female boa constrictor from the time she mated to the time she gave birth to a perfect clutch of babies. Impressed with the success of this device, my wife asked me to scale it up to control her entire operation. It will be much more complicated, with a minimum of 16 channels working individually with separate heating/cooling profiles.

The brain of this setup will be an Arduino Mega 2560, controlled via bluetooth by an android tablet running a purpose-made app to monitor the sensors, control the relays, and provide remote notifications. The mega was chosen because it has 16 analog inputs, one for every enclosure it will control. 16 matched digital outputs will control the relays to turn individual heating elements on and off as needed, giving every enclosure individual custom heating. We will also be attaching an RN-42 bluetooth module, and a simple RGB LED control circuit.