crusso1993
7500 Club Member
@ScottBrew - welcome to the club! I turned 50 back in March. I've calmed a lot but some still think I'm not quite right!
Wishing you a very Happy Birthday!
Wishing you a very Happy Birthday!
Another reef-pi build.
- Thread starter b4tn
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Erica-Renee
Valuable Member
Happy Birthday OLD MAN!! ooops nice man..
50 is only a number ,I Told this to my wife in Jan when she turned 50. She told . Yea a Very BIG One... OOPS ..
Then she said wait until its your turn.. OHH She is only 49...
50 is only a number ,I Told this to my wife in Jan when she turned 50. She told . Yea a Very BIG One... OOPS ..
Then she said wait until its your turn.. OHH She is only 49...
Diamond1
Valuable Member
Happy Birtday! @ScottBrew
ScottBrew
Active Member
I know I'm still not right!
You were off by a year... the wrong way? OOOOH, that's trouble! HEHEHE
I feel fortunate to be here!
Thank you all!!! I told my wife I am only celebrating decennial birthdays anymore (yes, I had to google decennial). It's been a great week, she threw a surprise party last Saturday night. We both took today off, so lunch in Tampa and a movie today and dinner tonight with family.
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b4tn
Valuable Member
@crusso1993, @ScottBrew, @Diamond1, you guys are not helping my case one bit! I turned 42 last June. I tried getting my kids into the hobby since I have been doing something fish tank related since I was 12 and they tell me it’s a “dad” hobby. Meaning only old guys would be interested lol.
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b4tn
Valuable Member
Thanks, there are lots of people on here that have great advice and don’t mind answering questions when you are stuck. I always find DIY stuff more rewarding.
ScottBrew
Active Member
Mine don't care much about running the tank but do like going to the coral and fish store to help pick out new additions! It's a different time now! Being 42, you didn't have a cell phone in your pocket at 8 years old just to walk home from school! It's hard to get them interested when they know nothing about patience, it's about instant gratification. I'm certainly not saying I walked to school 10 miles, uphill both ways, in the snow, barefooted but I'm different from my parents generation too. Heck, at 12, we had to rely on <eek> books, books that may have been 20 years old with outdated info to raise our fish. Now we have great forums like R2R (shameless suck up to the mods!)
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b4tn
Valuable Member
Just when I think I am almost done I change my mind. After much debate I decided to add light control to my build as well. So I ordered some more parts today. I will be controlling two ocean revive t247 lights. Since the built in drivers do not allow dimming below 10% I will need to turn them on and off with relays. But it will be nice to have them synced and times in reef-pi. The built in PWM outputs are taken already for the dosers so I ordered a PCA9685, some relays, and some other assorted connectors. I have already turned on the light control in reef-pi and have been playing with the schedule.
I have been putting it off and this power module box has been my least favorite part of the build so far. I don’t know why but these stiff romex wires are a pain. I’m using braided wire from the relays to the plugs so it’s easier to take the lid on and off as needed. I’m just waiting for my power connector to get here and I can finish the power module.
The white power wire is tying all the silver connectors on the outlets together. The bare wire ties all the green connectors together. And the black hot wires are braided and will go to the either the normally closed or normally open space on the relays.
I have been putting it off and this power module box has been my least favorite part of the build so far. I don’t know why but these stiff romex wires are a pain. I’m using braided wire from the relays to the plugs so it’s easier to take the lid on and off as needed. I’m just waiting for my power connector to get here and I can finish the power module.
The white power wire is tying all the silver connectors on the outlets together. The bare wire ties all the green connectors together. And the black hot wires are braided and will go to the either the normally closed or normally open space on the relays.
Diamond1
Valuable Member
They will come around. My daughter was 4 when I got into the hobby and never showed much interest. She's about to turn 26 in February and I think I finally have her hooked.
Diamond1
Valuable Member
Just when I think I am almost done I change my mind. After much debate I decided to add light control to my build as well. So I ordered some more parts today. I will be controlling two ocean revive t247 lights. Since the built in drivers do not allow dimming below 10% I will need to turn them on and off with relays. But it will be nice to have them synced and times in reef-pi. The built in PWM outputs are taken already for the dosers so I ordered a PCA9685, some relays, and some other assorted connectors. I have already turned on the light control in reef-pi and have been playing with the schedule.
I have been putting it off and this power module box has been my least favorite part of the build so far. I don’t know why but these stiff romex wires are a pain. I’m using braided wire from the relays to the plugs so it’s easier to take the lid on and off as needed. I’m just waiting for my power connector to get here and I can finish the power module.
The white power wire is tying all the silver connectors on the outlets together. The bare wire ties all the green connectors together. And the black hot wires are braided and will go to the either the normally closed or normally open space on the relays.
Looking good.
I have been messing around with my lights today to make sure that everything is going to work as I want it to.
I bought 12v relays for switching them on/off but I had some issues with them. They suck a lot of power and caused some weird issues with the pwm signals from the pi. They seemed to cause the pwm signal to flicker.
I swapped them out for 5v and the flickering stopped. Not 100% sure if the flickering was cause by the increased voltage draw of the 12 v relays drawn straight from the pi hat 12v rail, but it may be something to consider when you pick relays for light control.
Since your going to set things up with the PCA 9685 you may not have the same issue. I'm running my relays straight from the pis GPIO pins.
Here's the lighting schedule I'm testing my lights with right now.
I have the timers for the blue channel set at 8AM to turn the relay on, then it ramps to a peak of 61% at 12PM then they ramp down to 8PM and the timer turns the channel off at 8PM.
The white channel relay turns on at 10AM and then ramps up to 45% at 2PM then ramps down till 8PM but the relay is set to shut off at 7:30PM.
This is just for testing the lights and may change once I see how the tank reacts.
ScottBrew
Active Member
Looking good! There is nothing wrong with Romex, but yes, it's a pain to use in tight quarters. I used stranded wire stripped out of computer power cords, made a much more flexible harness.Just when I think I am almost done I change my mind. After much debate I decided to add light control to my build as well. So I ordered some more parts today. I will be controlling two ocean revive t247 lights. Since the built in drivers do not allow dimming below 10% I will need to turn them on and off with relays. But it will be nice to have them synced and times in reef-pi. The built in PWM outputs are taken already for the dosers so I ordered a PCA9685, some relays, and some other assorted connectors. I have already turned on the light control in reef-pi and have been playing with the schedule.
I have been putting it off and this power module box has been my least favorite part of the build so far. I don’t know why but these stiff romex wires are a pain. I’m using braided wire from the relays to the plugs so it’s easier to take the lid on and off as needed. I’m just waiting for my power connector to get here and I can finish the power module.
The white power wire is tying all the silver connectors on the outlets together. The bare wire ties all the green connectors together. And the black hot wires are braided and will go to the either the normally closed or normally open space on the relays.
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b4tn
Valuable Member
I wont be changing things up but if I do this again in the future I will probably do the same. I have a whole bunch of white and green left over wire from the power cord I used to get the stranded black wire.
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b4tn
Valuable Member
Looking good.
I have been messing around with my lights today to make sure that everything is going to work as I want it to.
I bought 12v relays for switching them on/off but I had some issues with them. They suck a lot of power and caused some weird issues with the pwm signals from the pi. They seemed to cause the pwm signal to flicker.
I swapped them out for 5v and the flickering stopped. Not 100% sure if the flickering was cause by the increased voltage draw of the 12 v relays drawn straight from the pi hat 12v rail, but it may be something to consider when you pick relays for light control.
Since your going to set things up with the PCA 9685 you may not have the same issue. I'm running my relays straight from the pis GPIO pins.
Here's the lighting schedule I'm testing my lights with right now.
I have the timers for the blue channel set at 8AM to turn the relay on, then it ramps to a peak of 61% at 12PM then they ramp down to 8PM and the timer turns the channel off at 8PM.
The white channel relay turns on at 10AM and then ramps up to 45% at 2PM then ramps down till 8PM but the relay is set to shut off at 7:30PM.
This is just for testing the lights and may change once I see how the tank reacts.
Thats strange, are you running anything else from this pi? Or is it just lights? I looked into it and the octocoupled relay shields that you get on ebay only have a 5ma trigger requirement so I was going to run mine straight of the GPIO also. But I am also using a larger 12 volt 5 amp power supply.
I run my lights at pretty much the same intensity 65/45, 9hours/7 hours. Right now I am using the diurnal schedule blues start ramping 10am and end at 9pm. Whites start ramping 11 am and end at 8pm. I am concerned how things are going to react with the extra hour of ramping light in the morning and extra hour in the evening but it wont be full intensity. I couldnt figure out a way to do it without either increasing or decreasing full intensity time.
crusso1993
7500 Club Member
Are you saying that we are old? I also like to golf. I guess that makes me REALLY old! Lol
I had my first SW aquarium in 1985, when I was 17. Have been in and out of the hobby ever since. The last setups I had were from 1994 - 2004. They were a 350g, 125g and 30g with a 20g QT.
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b4tn
Valuable Member
LOL in my kids eyes anyone over 40 is old. My Oldest son has left home for the military but he said that they call it over the hill for a reason. He said "dad you are over 40, look up the definition of over the hill". "Old and past one's prime" ha ha I say I am just getting started.
Diamond1
Valuable Member
I figured out the power supply was the problem. It is only a 1 amp supply and it's actually not even producing .5 amps. I was using it to power the pi and the relays and it was struggling to run both. I will be replacing that with a better supply. Good news is the 5 volt supplies work and I'm just going to use them for the lights.
Old is a relative thing. If it's golf and reef tanks I'm down with that.
Now to just get rid of that pesky job thing every day and I'll be good.
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b4tn
Valuable Member
I am still waiting for my power inlet to arrive but should be here tomorrow. But I was really having second thoughts on how I planned to wire everything so I had to do a little more research and ask more questions. With help from @Diamond1 , @ScottBrew , and @Erica-Renee I put together this diagram for hopefully a good visual. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to have some of the outlets stay on if reef-pi was off or powered down but also wanted some outlets to be off if reef-pi was off. Here is a diagram of how I will achieve this.
The green and white wire are all tied together across all the outlets. The black hot wire goes to com (common) and is shared connection across all the relays. Next you will choose either NC (normally closed) or NO (Normally Open) depending on how you want your relay to control the outlet.
In "most cases" the relays we work with for this project have 3 terminals (make sure to read the manufacturers specs to verify) These terminals are usually laid out with Com in the middle, NC on the right, and NO on the left. Like so.
Remember that in reef-pi if you have your relay wired (Normally Closed) you will need to go to the configuration tab, connectors, and switch the pin for the outlet you are controlling to "reverse" so that reef-pi will control it correctly.
The green and white wire are all tied together across all the outlets. The black hot wire goes to com (common) and is shared connection across all the relays. Next you will choose either NC (normally closed) or NO (Normally Open) depending on how you want your relay to control the outlet.
In "most cases" the relays we work with for this project have 3 terminals (make sure to read the manufacturers specs to verify) These terminals are usually laid out with Com in the middle, NC on the right, and NO on the left. Like so.
Remember that in reef-pi if you have your relay wired (Normally Closed) you will need to go to the configuration tab, connectors, and switch the pin for the outlet you are controlling to "reverse" so that reef-pi will control it correctly.
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