Heating/Lighting Control for Bearded Dragon or Gecko

Hello,
We are new here and just wanted to share a couple of projects we built to accommodate the heating and lighting requirements for our new reptile family additions. I am VERY into microcontrollers and home automation via Arduino and ESP8266 so this was right up my alley.
Full on instructions/video for Leonardo our Gecko's setup can be found here:
https://www.instructables.com/id/Spotted-Gecko-Habitat-Temperature-MonitorThermosta/
Prototype Vid: https://youtu.be/oGoyxCnPvhM
Finished Vid: https://youtu.be/P9-Z1zm9V40

A video of the prototype for our Beardie DaVinci's rig can be found here:
Prototype Vid: https://youtu.be/XUVerxR-V2E
This setup is very similar to Leonardo's but is based on time and temp with multiple relays due to the more complex lighting requirements. It has been completed and is currently controlling all for DaVinci.

Hope someone gets the motivation to try something like this out. It was fun to build and is VERY satisfying contributing to the happiness of your Lizard Family!

Thanks for sharing this. I use a (commercial) programmable thermostat as well and find it to be a huge help for automating the lighting. For dragons, it's best to control heat from above so I use a ceramic heat emitter rather than a UTH. What was the overall cost for building this yourself? A good controller can cost over $100 out of the box so this may present a good value for those who are comfortable with some embedded control.

We use all 'over the tank' heat for our Beardie. Got him a halogen light for the auxiliary heat on the opposite end. Mr. Gecko gets the UTH. All in max cost for the parts to build the controller...$43.00:
(1) 2 channel relay - $6.00
(1) ESP8266 Controller - $4.00
(1) NODEMCU Base - $3.00
(1) DHT11 Humidity Sensor - $4.00
(2) DS18B20 Temp Sensor - $8.00
(1) Craft box to hold all - $5.00
(1) Double end extension cord - $10.00
(1) 16x2 LCD - $3.00
On top of that we have the web server running on the controller as well so we know the temps and humidity by looking at his website on our phones while at home. And...I had an old Arlo camera so I have that focused on his house with the LCD visible so we can see how he and his house are doing while we are away at work, etc..
All connections are soldered and shrinktubed now but you get the idea.

Fun Stuff!

That's a pretty good deal. With some port forwarding on your firewall you should be able to set it so you can access the site and camera from outside of your network as well.

Yes Yes...VPN and DDNS.