I've been using an AI Prime 16 HD over a 10G tank in my rack for some low light corals and anemones, and a week and change ago, I had a strange fault: it would come on and act normal, but was all green. On closer inspection, it was that the light appeared green because both blue channels seemed to have burned out. The unit could be reprogrammed and setup as normal and reported no errors or error codes, but the light was green, and the output was substantially lower than normal.
So I went on to find a replacement, paired it up with the app, tested it out, installed it, and then got a different failure mode: the lights looked really purple, like the white channels hadn't been enabled but clearly red and blue had been. Now this light just tested fine minutes earlier on the same profile I've been using for ages, so what could it have been?
The power supply.
The power supply still reads 24V unloaded, but when loaded down, the voltage drops, and since the Prime 16 HD isn't monitoring its input voltage/current (or at least doesn't react to it being insufficient), it boots up and configures fine, goes to turn on the channels, drops to a lower voltage operating mode, and then just sort of sits there, going through the day with some channels off. I did observe my original unit get some normal looking lighting (not sure if every channel was good, though) towards the end of the day, when the consumption should be low (and the loading low, so less dragging down of the power supply voltage), so presumably it can recover fine and it has to do with minimum voltages for the converters used to drive the LEDs, but when I swapped power supplies to the one that came with the new unit instead of the one installed, it was fixed, and the same is true now on my old unit. It's odd to me that the channels that worked were different between different units, and were consistent through power cycling - it appears to be deterministic based on the unit (maybe hardware revision) rather than random, and they are running on the same firmware.
I've got proper measurement stuff for this, so I'll try to elaborate on the failure mode soon, but since I didn't see it documented elsewhere, I think it's an important thing to mention:
If your AI Prime 16 HD starts missing channels and the color looks really funny, especially if only during bright parts of the day, it may not be the light that is bad, it may be the power supply.
So I went on to find a replacement, paired it up with the app, tested it out, installed it, and then got a different failure mode: the lights looked really purple, like the white channels hadn't been enabled but clearly red and blue had been. Now this light just tested fine minutes earlier on the same profile I've been using for ages, so what could it have been?
The power supply.
The power supply still reads 24V unloaded, but when loaded down, the voltage drops, and since the Prime 16 HD isn't monitoring its input voltage/current (or at least doesn't react to it being insufficient), it boots up and configures fine, goes to turn on the channels, drops to a lower voltage operating mode, and then just sort of sits there, going through the day with some channels off. I did observe my original unit get some normal looking lighting (not sure if every channel was good, though) towards the end of the day, when the consumption should be low (and the loading low, so less dragging down of the power supply voltage), so presumably it can recover fine and it has to do with minimum voltages for the converters used to drive the LEDs, but when I swapped power supplies to the one that came with the new unit instead of the one installed, it was fixed, and the same is true now on my old unit. It's odd to me that the channels that worked were different between different units, and were consistent through power cycling - it appears to be deterministic based on the unit (maybe hardware revision) rather than random, and they are running on the same firmware.
I've got proper measurement stuff for this, so I'll try to elaborate on the failure mode soon, but since I didn't see it documented elsewhere, I think it's an important thing to mention:
If your AI Prime 16 HD starts missing channels and the color looks really funny, especially if only during bright parts of the day, it may not be the light that is bad, it may be the power supply.