What’s really strange. All the errors in the RKL cleared. I just hooked it back up to check some of my times and it’s working fine. I had a bad cable lol
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Very cool! I'm glad to see it up and running. Can't really see your setup on my phone. I'll check it out on my pc tonight.What’s really strange. All the errors in the RKL cleared. I just hooked it back up to check some of my times and it’s working fine. I had a bad cable lol
One of these days I will build a nice wood cabinet to mount all this stuff in. But this will do for now. Reef-pi is officially running my reef. This weekend I will pull the lights apart to modify and plug them in as well.
Looks very good all wrapped up and ready to go!
Is everything working as it should?
It’s been a day!!! I have been putting off light surgery for some time now because I just knew something was going to go wrong and I would be SOL. Well Murphy did not disappoint. But to start, I had said I was going to be installing moon lights to control via PWM into my OR lights. I know that I wanted to use 5 20mA LED’s so I used the below link to calculate the best way to wire them to 12 volts.
http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz
I came up with this.
So now it was time to take the lights apart and start drilling [emoji29]I got the lights apart with no issues. Drilled the holes and mounted and wired the lights.
I looked over and over this light enclosure and could not find a way that I could put in another plug without having an eye sore giant connector sticking out so I changed my plan a bit and decided to wire in a single wire instead of a plug. I drilled a second hole in the top to slide a wire through so it’s much cleaner looking and follows the power wire nicely. With the light mounted you can’t even see it.
Then the fun began lol. I hooked up the light and it would not power off with the relays and only one channel would dim. [emoji35]I messed around with it for a bit and found that for some reason the moon lights which get their 12 volts from the led drivers in the lights where the issue. I unplugged them and the lights powered on and off but still no dimming on one channel. So I pulled everything apart and found the PWM wire was broken in the connector so fixed that and moved the 12 volt wire for the moon lights to the 12 volt fan wire. After putting everything together the moon light still screws with the lights powering on and off. I’m not sure if there is a short somewhere or the drivers just don’t like having something else on them so unplugged it again and lights worked. I could dim them and all was well except one thing. When I turned off the relay the blue lights would flicker.
This is very strange because the relays are working. Even if I disconnected them completely the lights would flicker while powered off. They are being run off a pca9685 and if I dimmed them to 0 the flicker stopped. But this doesn’t work for me since I need them to be in fixed mode and on off with the relay till I get it all finished. I tried several restarts, changing channels, and nothing seemed to work. So figured just for the heck of it I will try running it off the rpi pwm. Switched the plugs around and everything works as it should. I still have to figure out the moon light issue but it appears the OR lights do not like the pca9685.
I think it’s time to walk away for now I have been at it all day.
Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. Rough nite at work.
I was going to ask if you tried running it straight from the pi pwm signals but while I was making nachos you posted you had.
Is there any way you can run the power for the moon lights from the power supply that runs your relays or from a 12 volt rail on the pi hat? Might take some of the strain off the drivers if that's what's causing the erratic behavior with the channel flashing.
Yes I believe @Jonathan Troutt is running vipraspectas in his build.Hey guys... yes, NACHOS GOOD!
This is a touch off of the current build but do you know if there is anyone controlling Viparspectras with reef pi?
Yes I believe @Jonathan Troutt is running vipraspectas in his build.
The moon light as soon as it gave me issues I removed it from the picture completely so I could rule it out. Coincidently the power source it was connected to was not the channel that was flashing.
The drivers in the OR lights have 2,12 volt power sources. The fan and the wire that powers the controller. I tried both as all the time 12 volts for the led and ran the ground wire back to the pi transistor pwm circuit that would switch them to ground and dim them. It worked for the moon lights just fine. But tapping into the 12 volts on the light itself caused it to not dim or not turn off. I removed that right away to gonna k to later.
The light issues was something separate all together. They would dim just fine and worked as expected. Using the relay switching the on off wire I could turn off the whites with no issue, turn off blues no issue, turn them both off and the blues would flash in random flickering. It did this on every jack I configured on the pca9685. If I disconnected “one” of the pwm wires didn’t matter which, from the pca9685 that one light would go to 10% and not dim but the other would just fine and both would power on and off just fine. Very strange issue. Connecting them direct to the rpi pwm pins 18 and 19 solved the issue. They all work fine now.
Going back to the moon lights. I went ahead and bought a separate 2 conductor security wire at Home Depot and wired the moon lights back to the moon light pwm circuit. The 12 volts is coming from the rpi power supply now and ground goes to the transistor circuit that gets pwm from the pca9685 and it works as expected with no interference in the OR lights. It turns off and dims as expected.
@Diamond1 each light requires 7 wires to go back to the pi and relays
Ground
Pwm white
Pwm blue
12 volt on white
12 volt white
12 volt on blue
12 volt blue
The cat 5 cable only has 8 wires. That’s why I was tying to source the 12 volts from inside the light and use the last available wire as the ground/pwm wire. But for some reason the drivers did not like it.
@Ranjib I used to have an O-scope years ago. It was actually a giant box with a CRT display lol. I think the flicker issues you had where different. I was getting flicker not from the dimming but from the powered off state. I would be curious to see what the pca9685 is outputting that caused a completely powered off light driver to flicker the lights. Near as I can tell the pca9685 works just fine. My moon lights are dimming up and down with no issues on it. Once I finish the lights I will be curious to see how it runs the dosers since moving them over from the rpi to the pca9685
Now that one light is working time to get busy on light number 2. Hopefully it goes smoother today
The lights look good. It's cool that you were able to get things working.
Now you need to spend 8 hours cleaning up the mess before the wife finds it.