Mastertronic Amazing
- Thread starter Wyz1981
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Care to elaborate? I am looking for automated dosing and Mastetronic and Trident are my 2 choices. Trident would be cheaper for me since i have the Apex.
Is the Mastertronic doing the testing and dosing ?
Do yourself a favor and avoid the mastertronic. I’ve owned mine for 5 months now and have had nothing but trouble and customer support is a nightmare…
sculpin01
Well-Known Member
Mastertronic is honestly a work in progress, which is good and bad. The Facebook support page is very active with the inventor offering updates and support directly to end users. However, it is definitely not plug-and-play, requiring regular attention and maintenance.
If Neptune comes out with a Trident that also tests for nitrate and phosphate, I’m probably going to ditch the MT.
If Neptune comes out with a Trident that also tests for nitrate and phosphate, I’m probably going to ditch the MT.
Jon's Reef
Valuable Member
There are 3 “levels” of testers.
Kh Director, Alkatronic, Kh Guardian (and more coming soon)
Just tests Alk using the well documented acid titration. Reagent costs nothing, waste can go back in the tank… just works perfect. Little to no maintenance (check ph probe calibration)
Trident:
Uses reagent based method with colorimeter. Requires calibration. Bonus of getting Ca and Mg in addition to Alk. Downside is the calibration. The included reference solution seems to be off, but could be due to some odd chemical interference. Can be solved if you test your tank and use that as the calibration method. Very easy to setup and maintain. Just pop in new reagents every so often and then every few years replace hoses and parts (or exchange for a refurb). If you like having a “black box” machine where it does its thing and you get a result, trident is nice.
MT and Reefbot:
Extensible colorimetric testing using standard kits. I have had the MT for a week, never had a RB so cannot speak for it. Big benefit is you can test what you want when you want. So far Alk, Mg, Ca, NO2, NO3 (including NO2 compensation), PO4, I, Fe and OLI (basically water clarity). Each test supports multiple brands of kits. The only limit is that Alk can only be tested once per day. You can manually start extra Alk tests (or any test) with the manual start button as often as you want. The designer is very active with the community and they are continually adding new tests and refining methods. It is a little more work than the Trident, but you get the benefit for what you put in. Also you have more access to the machine so if something is running odd, it is easy to troubleshoot.
If you only care about Alk, one of the acid testers will be best. If you have an Apex, Trident has full integration and gives you Ca and Mg too. If you want to spend a little more time (and get more in return) the MT is the right one. Personally after having the MT for just a week I could see getting an Alkatronic to add to it.
Kh Director, Alkatronic, Kh Guardian (and more coming soon)
Just tests Alk using the well documented acid titration. Reagent costs nothing, waste can go back in the tank… just works perfect. Little to no maintenance (check ph probe calibration)
Trident:
Uses reagent based method with colorimeter. Requires calibration. Bonus of getting Ca and Mg in addition to Alk. Downside is the calibration. The included reference solution seems to be off, but could be due to some odd chemical interference. Can be solved if you test your tank and use that as the calibration method. Very easy to setup and maintain. Just pop in new reagents every so often and then every few years replace hoses and parts (or exchange for a refurb). If you like having a “black box” machine where it does its thing and you get a result, trident is nice.
MT and Reefbot:
Extensible colorimetric testing using standard kits. I have had the MT for a week, never had a RB so cannot speak for it. Big benefit is you can test what you want when you want. So far Alk, Mg, Ca, NO2, NO3 (including NO2 compensation), PO4, I, Fe and OLI (basically water clarity). Each test supports multiple brands of kits. The only limit is that Alk can only be tested once per day. You can manually start extra Alk tests (or any test) with the manual start button as often as you want. The designer is very active with the community and they are continually adding new tests and refining methods. It is a little more work than the Trident, but you get the benefit for what you put in. Also you have more access to the machine so if something is running odd, it is easy to troubleshoot.
If you only care about Alk, one of the acid testers will be best. If you have an Apex, Trident has full integration and gives you Ca and Mg too. If you want to spend a little more time (and get more in return) the MT is the right one. Personally after having the MT for just a week I could see getting an Alkatronic to add to it.
I will give my input here as I have the Alkatronic, Dosetronic, Reefbot and now the Mastertronic to replace my Reefbot. I also have had the KH Director. Let's just say I love automation - I am also a techi so this sort of stuff doesn't bother me in the least.
If you have SPS, the Alkatronic is the way to go. If you dose a multi-part product (I do Triton, 4 part), the Dosetronic is of extreme value. I test 6x/day and have my 7 dosing amounts that vary throughout the day based on consumption.
I have had the Gen 1 Reefbot for a couple of years (going to be selling mine here soon). It has worked well but had its glitches. One of the limitations is only 8 vials (Mastertronic is 12). The testing time is long (as much as 45 minutes). I found the Reefbot to not be quite as accurate as the Mastertronic in my phosphate test. It was very close, but not like the MT.
I just recently bought the Mastertronic. I was waiting as long as I could to see how the ION Director was going to pan out...tired of waiting. I followed the instructions carefully and got it up and running with no issues really. Couple small things not documented in the manual, but figured it out with no issue. If you take your time, follow the directions carefully and do all the upgrades up front, you will be good to go. The most important thing with the Mastertronic is to calibrate and verify the measures carefully. For example, for the first few verifications, my syringe was at 0.59 rather than 0.6 cc (as recommended by the manual)....I kept redoing the calibration until it was 0.6. If you have all the calibrations perfect, your results will be dead on. I got it up and running and tested phosphate, nitrate, Mg and iodine with no problem. I will be adding KH to check my Alkatronic on a weekly basis. When I did my first test of P04, it came back as 0.066...I checked it against my Hanna checker....0.07...so dead on.
The other thing I recently did was setup a dedicated 2.4GHz router on my Orbi router. By doing that I get much more reliable connectivity on these IOT devices...they like plain ole 2.4GHz.
Finally, I put all of these electronics on a small battery backup so that if I get any glitches on the power, it doesn't mess with the electronics. The Focustronic and ReefBot devices utilize a Rasberry Pi as their brains and they are really sensitive to power glitches.
In general, Focustronic's support has been excellent for me. If you use the proper channels of their email or application, I have always gotten a response within a day or less. It really annoys me when I see people post on FB or something and don't have an answer within an hour ...especially on a Sunday.
Here is a recent picture of my tank...I have had some decent success...
Hope this helps.
If you have SPS, the Alkatronic is the way to go. If you dose a multi-part product (I do Triton, 4 part), the Dosetronic is of extreme value. I test 6x/day and have my 7 dosing amounts that vary throughout the day based on consumption.
I have had the Gen 1 Reefbot for a couple of years (going to be selling mine here soon). It has worked well but had its glitches. One of the limitations is only 8 vials (Mastertronic is 12). The testing time is long (as much as 45 minutes). I found the Reefbot to not be quite as accurate as the Mastertronic in my phosphate test. It was very close, but not like the MT.
I just recently bought the Mastertronic. I was waiting as long as I could to see how the ION Director was going to pan out...tired of waiting. I followed the instructions carefully and got it up and running with no issues really. Couple small things not documented in the manual, but figured it out with no issue. If you take your time, follow the directions carefully and do all the upgrades up front, you will be good to go. The most important thing with the Mastertronic is to calibrate and verify the measures carefully. For example, for the first few verifications, my syringe was at 0.59 rather than 0.6 cc (as recommended by the manual)....I kept redoing the calibration until it was 0.6. If you have all the calibrations perfect, your results will be dead on. I got it up and running and tested phosphate, nitrate, Mg and iodine with no problem. I will be adding KH to check my Alkatronic on a weekly basis. When I did my first test of P04, it came back as 0.066...I checked it against my Hanna checker....0.07...so dead on.
The other thing I recently did was setup a dedicated 2.4GHz router on my Orbi router. By doing that I get much more reliable connectivity on these IOT devices...they like plain ole 2.4GHz.
Finally, I put all of these electronics on a small battery backup so that if I get any glitches on the power, it doesn't mess with the electronics. The Focustronic and ReefBot devices utilize a Rasberry Pi as their brains and they are really sensitive to power glitches.
In general, Focustronic's support has been excellent for me. If you use the proper channels of their email or application, I have always gotten a response within a day or less. It really annoys me when I see people post on FB or something and don't have an answer within an hour ...especially on a Sunday.
Here is a recent picture of my tank...I have had some decent success...
Hope this helps.
Last edited:
I’m in the GHL ecosystem, and am running out of patience waiting for the ION Director. But that still won’t measure phosphate anyway. Mastertronic is tempting. I just wish there was a way to interface it to the GHL Profilux.
I jumped back into reefing about 2 years ago after an almost 20 year hiatus. I ended up with Neptune/Trident/DOS and I am very happy with it so far. The app is really easy to use, it tests and presents the data numerically and graphically with some historian and superimposing capabilities for different parameters. It changed the way I thought about the interdependencies and interactions in the tank and ultimately how I manage my system. My biggest wish would be that they add Nitrate and Phosphate testing capabilities. Its not perfect, so I hope they continue to improve the equipment and software but overall I'm happy. Also, great customer service for the 3 or so tickets I logged with them.
lefkonj
Active Member
Have had the trident for a while. I trust nothing to control my levels of dosing for me, but that is me. It provides testing results and for the most part has been accurate. Once a month I run manual tests to validate. Calibration solutions are relatively accurate and the maintenance has been easy. Once I had to send the trident in to be 'replaced' by Apex but that was fine and they sent me a replacement unit, it was years old at that point.
Hydros just came out with a alk tester so I am waiting on them to have other options. I had the MT for about a year. Had bad experiences with their customer service. Owner blamed the moderators in the group and went silent when I asked for proof. I gave the unit away to someone.
I bought the unit to make my life easier but ended up being more work to maintain and fix issues with it. If you enjoy tinkering, you might like it. I was hoping for something to help make my life easier not more frustrating.
I bought the unit to make my life easier but ended up being more work to maintain and fix issues with it. If you enjoy tinkering, you might like it. I was hoping for something to help make my life easier not more frustrating.
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It is interesting to read these posts- there have been a number recently covering the topic of KH testers- and dosing units and automation.
From what i can gather; there’s is a lot of anecdotal evidence for and agains all of these units and a lot of opinions as well! Some have great success- some have not; and it reflects in their ‘review‘ and opinion of these devices.
Whether you are using GHL, Trident, KH Director, KH Keeper or a different device it would seem that it is very much down to the individual whether it is ‘the best’ or whether it is ‘sh#t’…
Asking the question “which is the best” is like asking which religion is the best
I have personally gone with Reef Factory and their ecosystem of equipment and is running a KH Keeper Plus together with their dosing pumps. Automatic testing is done four times a day with automatic adjustment of the KH- and other Triton components. Works a treat for me and my results are supported by bi-monthly ICP tests.
Cheers!
From what i can gather; there’s is a lot of anecdotal evidence for and agains all of these units and a lot of opinions as well! Some have great success- some have not; and it reflects in their ‘review‘ and opinion of these devices.
Whether you are using GHL, Trident, KH Director, KH Keeper or a different device it would seem that it is very much down to the individual whether it is ‘the best’ or whether it is ‘sh#t’…
Asking the question “which is the best” is like asking which religion is the best
I have personally gone with Reef Factory and their ecosystem of equipment and is running a KH Keeper Plus together with their dosing pumps. Automatic testing is done four times a day with automatic adjustment of the KH- and other Triton components. Works a treat for me and my results are supported by bi-monthly ICP tests.
Cheers!
oh yeah for sure! But that's why we have variety. Whenever we make a post, we can only describe our own experiences.It is interesting to read these posts- there have been a number recently covering the topic of KH testers- and dosing units and automation.
From what i can gather; there’s is a lot of anecdotal evidence for and agains all of these units and a lot of opinions as well! Some have great success- some have not; and it reflects in their ‘review‘ and opinion of these devices.
Whether you are using GHL, Trident, KH Director, KH Keeper or a different device it would seem that it is very much down to the individual whether it is ‘the best’ or whether it is ‘sh#t’…
Asking the question “which is the best” is like asking which religion is the best
I have personally gone with Reef Factory and their ecosystem of equipment and is running a KH Keeper Plus together with their dosing pumps. Automatic testing is done four times a day with automatic adjustment of the KH- and other Triton components. Works a treat for me and my results are supported by bi-monthly ICP tests.
Cheers!
People can take it and use it or not.
But I do have to say that you should take opinions of those that had them for a while versus just bought it and are still in the excitement stage.
Joe31415
Valuable Member
I really like my Mastertronic. Like someone else mentioned, it's a work in progress. They have a few areas that need some work.
The biggest one, and I think a lot of people will agree with me, is the app, or the app/device interaction, is horrendously slow. And if you get ahead of it, one of two thing will happen. At best, if you're lucky, the command will simply be ignored. At worst, you need to start over, which is annoying when you're doing something that requires multiple steps. You really need to be careful to wait for the app (or the device) to react to anything you do before moving on to the next step. Even things like opening the app and waiting for the screen to fully populate before doing anything. Even though the button you need to click is already there, if you don't let it finish, which can be another 10-30 seconds, it's going to be mad at you.
Along with that, if your phone screen turns off, it disconnects from the device. Generally not a big deal, but if you're calibrating something, you need to make sure your phone stays awake or you'll have to start over. That can easily turn, what should take 30 seconds, but on the MT take 15 minutes into a 30 minute project.
Also, calibrating the pumps and needles is ungodly time consuming.
My other issue with the device is that it seems to lack the ability to do more than one thing at a time. I believe each individual thing it does, has it's own procedure/subroutine in the code and doesn't start one the next one until the first one is done.
For example, when you run a test it (from memory, some steps may be missing/incorrect, but it's just for this example):
1)Prime RO Line.
2)Empty RO Vial
3a)Fill RO Vial
3b)Fill syringe
3c)Empty syringe
3d)Empty RO Vial
Repeat Steps 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d three times.
4)Prime tank water line
5)Empty reaction vial
6)Fill reaction vial
7)Move carousal
8)Move needle to reagent vial
9)Stir reagent
10)Draw up reagent
11)Move needle to reaction vial
12)Empty syringe
13)Move syringe to RO Vial
14a)Fill RO Vial
14b)Fill syringe with RO
14c)Empty syringe
14d)Empty RO Vial
Repeat 14a-d three times
and so on until it's done testing.
IMO, a lot of these steps can be combined with no hardware changes. For example, there's no reason I can see that it can't be filling both the RO and tank water vials at the same time. It *might* only be able to empty one at a time, but they can both be filled. Similarly, one can be filling while the other one is being emptied or having water drawn out of it. Or, it could be moving on to the next step while a vial is just being emptied.
With some extra hardware, like another magnetic stirrer, it could be stirring the reagent while it's doing something else.
I could go on.
Regardless of all that, I really do like it and I think most of the issues I'm seeing should be easily ironed out as it matures.
I do like that, regardless of how long it takes, I essentially just let it do it's thing, whether that means running tests on a schedule and pushing the results to my phone or watching TV while I let it run a test I manually asked it to do is nice. However, there are times when I'm waiting for a test to finish and it's hard no to think that I could have pulled out the Hanna kit and had an answer before this even finished cleaning the vials and syringe.
Oh, one more thing I'd really like to see with the app. The ability to queue multiple (manual) tests. If I want to test, for example, alk, calc and nitrate. I have to run the test for alk, wait for it to fully finish, as in the machine has to be back to 'idle' before requesting the next one. It would be nice if I could just request them all at one and it would do one and then the other (and in a perfect world, wouldn't clean everything at the end of one test just to clean it all again when the next one begins).
The biggest one, and I think a lot of people will agree with me, is the app, or the app/device interaction, is horrendously slow. And if you get ahead of it, one of two thing will happen. At best, if you're lucky, the command will simply be ignored. At worst, you need to start over, which is annoying when you're doing something that requires multiple steps. You really need to be careful to wait for the app (or the device) to react to anything you do before moving on to the next step. Even things like opening the app and waiting for the screen to fully populate before doing anything. Even though the button you need to click is already there, if you don't let it finish, which can be another 10-30 seconds, it's going to be mad at you.
Along with that, if your phone screen turns off, it disconnects from the device. Generally not a big deal, but if you're calibrating something, you need to make sure your phone stays awake or you'll have to start over. That can easily turn, what should take 30 seconds, but on the MT take 15 minutes into a 30 minute project.
Also, calibrating the pumps and needles is ungodly time consuming.
My other issue with the device is that it seems to lack the ability to do more than one thing at a time. I believe each individual thing it does, has it's own procedure/subroutine in the code and doesn't start one the next one until the first one is done.
For example, when you run a test it (from memory, some steps may be missing/incorrect, but it's just for this example):
1)Prime RO Line.
2)Empty RO Vial
3a)Fill RO Vial
3b)Fill syringe
3c)Empty syringe
3d)Empty RO Vial
Repeat Steps 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d three times.
4)Prime tank water line
5)Empty reaction vial
6)Fill reaction vial
7)Move carousal
8)Move needle to reagent vial
9)Stir reagent
10)Draw up reagent
11)Move needle to reaction vial
12)Empty syringe
13)Move syringe to RO Vial
14a)Fill RO Vial
14b)Fill syringe with RO
14c)Empty syringe
14d)Empty RO Vial
Repeat 14a-d three times
and so on until it's done testing.
IMO, a lot of these steps can be combined with no hardware changes. For example, there's no reason I can see that it can't be filling both the RO and tank water vials at the same time. It *might* only be able to empty one at a time, but they can both be filled. Similarly, one can be filling while the other one is being emptied or having water drawn out of it. Or, it could be moving on to the next step while a vial is just being emptied.
With some extra hardware, like another magnetic stirrer, it could be stirring the reagent while it's doing something else.
I could go on.
Regardless of all that, I really do like it and I think most of the issues I'm seeing should be easily ironed out as it matures.
I do like that, regardless of how long it takes, I essentially just let it do it's thing, whether that means running tests on a schedule and pushing the results to my phone or watching TV while I let it run a test I manually asked it to do is nice. However, there are times when I'm waiting for a test to finish and it's hard no to think that I could have pulled out the Hanna kit and had an answer before this even finished cleaning the vials and syringe.
Oh, one more thing I'd really like to see with the app. The ability to queue multiple (manual) tests. If I want to test, for example, alk, calc and nitrate. I have to run the test for alk, wait for it to fully finish, as in the machine has to be back to 'idle' before requesting the next one. It would be nice if I could just request them all at one and it would do one and then the other (and in a perfect world, wouldn't clean everything at the end of one test just to clean it all again when the next one begins).
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