Pickupman66 Reef-pi Build

pickupman66 · Jan 16, 2019

I built this a while back and just added it into my tank thread, but I wanted to seperate that out for support and informational purposes. so here goes.

Goals:

completely replace DA Archon Controller
simple, clean and easy to do
learn how to solder

I think I have completed all of the above except fully remove the Archon. I still use its wavemaker functionality as it has not been fully implemented into reef-pi.

below is that post brought over.

pickupman66 said:
The last two weeks have been interesting to say the least. One thursday evening, my Archon controller started to reboot. somehow it was not happy and I could not get it stable to connect to the buss and my wifi. I have NO CLUE what happened to it. after an hour of trying to get it back up, I gave up and swapped essential life controls over to a power strip and what outlets remained on and just left the head unit unplugged from the buss. The next am, I power cycled it yet again and still nothing.

After the issues the previous night, I decided i needed to start to migrate to another control system. to control what I currently have with my Archon, I would need 12-16 outlets plus some extra modules. we are talking serious $$$ for an Apex system (over $1000) or any other off the shelf controller. I had amassed my Archon up over 6 years or more so there was no initial sticker shock. Forking over that kind of dough would have left me and my reef in the doghouse.....

Fortunately I have been following the Reef-pi opensource controller thread and I have seen some similarities to the Archon in this setup (mainly the linux part). So, i made the decision and calculation that I could get into the reef-pi and get it started for about $150. Not bad. However it wont do all that my Archon can do at this point, but i can see the potential. Hopefully I can lend my beta team experiences with this as well.

Please go check out the Reef-pi here. https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/r...tank-controller-based-on-raspberry-pi.289256/

While it ended up at $165 or so plus some extraneous parts and pieces I already had, I am quite pleased considering a few things:

I have never worked with a Raspberry Pi before

I have never soldered in any way shape or form. ever. I have wanted to, and even got a nice soldering iron for christmas.

So below is what I purchased:

Pi 3b ( you can get the 3b+ for $39.99 but I messed up and got wrong one)

American DJ SRP8 Power strip with 8 relay controlled outlets (12 volt relays)

Cable for the SRP8

DB9 Connector breakouts for the SRP8 control circuits

DS18B20 thermometers and resistors for them to work properly.

12 Volt power supply

Buck Boost converter (convert the 12v down to 5v) - I really liked this one because of the readout on it.

Perma-Proto Hat

Darlington ULN2803a (step up from the 5v signal to the 12v for relays)

Jumper wires

I had a case for it all to go in and some automotive wire laying around. We reefers like to re-purpose stuff so I did in several cases along the way here.

Due to a busy week ahead, I had to just order and let everything come in.

My first attempt at Soldering. Not too bad. a but heavy with the big wires but I was pleased. This is THE temperature circuit. I have 3 sensors connected to this portion.

Here is the system after adding in the power supply and the Control for 8 outlets. The rainbow colors go from the top of the board and the GPIO pins down to the darlington where it then steps the signaling up to 12volts and delivers it to the DB9 connector.

Here is the outside of my project box. Unfortunatley the plastic was too thick for the connectors so I had to grind it down with my angle grinder on the inside for them to thread in. but hey, it works well now.

Goodies inside the box

Here is a Frtizing schematic of what I have built here.

to add 8 more channels I will add another breadboard and complete that circuitry probably next month

RJ45 breakout I had purchased for my Archon. this allows me to signal along a standard cat5E cable from the control box to the side of my tank. Connected here is the ATO float switch (white and blue) and two (now 3) temperature probes. They use power from the system delivered over the Cat5e and signal back on the yellow. Cool thing about these types of probes is that they each have a different address yet signal across the same circuit. so I can monitor the tank, Sump and the room temp. ***To clarify, I did not us the Raspberry PI ethernet jack in this at all.

SO, all that said now, I have control of 8 devices on my system. the reef-pi is controlling the heater and the auto top off.

Some of the graphing. good to see this data.

I still have to implement PH monitoring and hopefully Salinity Monitoring along with PWM control for Jebao pumps. This is all still in development.

pickupman66 · Jan 16, 2019

Aside from the above, I have added a PCA9685 for PWM production to be able to plan ahead for control of the Jebao WP pumps. I have these mocked up and ready to go.

Ranjib · Jan 16, 2019

Thank you for sharing

#reefpi

Diamond1 · Jan 16, 2019

Following

Ranjib · Feb 10, 2019

Worth calling out here that this build had encountered a major hiccup induced by hung raspberry pi, leading to temperature drop in tank for days. Thankfully livestock was fine, we are looking at watchdog configuration (to auto reboot pi when it’s hung) and persisting usage data during sudden power down

pickupman66 · Feb 10, 2019

Cross posting this from the Main reef-Pi thread.

MAJOR ISSUE today. as you know I had issues with my system alerting last week on the ATO. I have been traveling all week away from home and now that i am home, something was amis. my Clam did not look good. Plus one of the BTA walked around. I went to move a frag away from it and thought WOW, that water is COLD> I went to check Reef-pi and could not login. I put my cooking thermometer in the tank and it read 68°! HOLY MOLY! This is not good. I could not access reef-pi so I power cycled it. as soon as it came up, it started blowing up my phone with ATO alerts and also the LOW temperature alerts. I checked and I am about 4 gallons low. This means the system has not been working properly for at least 4 days. I dont know where to go to diagnose this. It appears to be operational at this moment as I can access and heater and ATO is working.

ALSO, since the reboot today, I have no historical graph data. all of that is missing.

Tank is at 70° but i am sure it got as low as 65° during the night.

I am on version 2.2 and I show no errors in the web GUI. All equipment was powered as my lights were on and all water movement pumps had power.

Full log file attached from just before the crash, thru the boot and up to active state after power cycle.

Logs skipped. Raspbian was not logging during the down time. evidence in that it was completely locked. all GPIO stayed in the state they were in at the hang.

Ranjib · Feb 10, 2019

There are a handful of posts of pi getting hung during nightly cron jobs in the main raspberry pi forum. Do you have anything else running on the pi?

pickupman66 · Feb 10, 2019

Ranjib said:
There are a handful of posts of pi getting hung during nightly cron jobs in the main raspberry pi forum. Do you have anything else running on the pi?

NO. Pi is strictly for the Reef. this would have been a 5:45PM local time job. IIRC, we were not home at the time.

Ranjib · Feb 10, 2019

As a first precautionary measure I’m advising to setup watchdog to auto reboot pi when something like this happen
https://www.switchdoc.com/2014/11/reliable-projects-using-internal-watchdog-timer-raspberry-pi/

Ideally we should be able to use adafruit triggers (with adafruit.io enabled setups) to alert in such situations as well. I.e. when reef-pi is not sending metrics adafruit will send us push or email notifications. But in reality this does not work (adafruit.io triggers) last time I checked

pickupman66 · Feb 10, 2019

Ill get to work on the Watchdog. HOwever initially when i ran the first command:
sudo modprobe bcm2708_wdog
the system stated:

I am running updates now on the system so we will see what happens now after it gets done.

pickupman66 · Feb 10, 2019

Yea, Updates failed. probably due to internet issues here. will try later on.

Ranjib · Feb 10, 2019

pickupman66 said:
Ill get to work on the Watchdog. HOwever initially when i ran the first command:
sudo modprobe bcm2708_wdog
the system stated:

I am running updates now on the system so we will see what happens now after it gets done.

you have to enable it from /boot/config.txt and reboot pi,

pickupman66 · Feb 10, 2019

OK. what code do I need to add to that file?

bishoptf · Feb 10, 2019

When you are able to update the OS post the results of uname -a and date. Here is what I am running currently with no issues, uptime is 28days....

Code:

bishop@tankpi:~ $ uname -a
Linux tankpi 4.14.79-v7+ #1159 SMP Sun Nov 4 17:50:20 GMT 2018 armv7l GNU/Linux
bishop@tankpi:~ $ date
Sun 10 Feb 19:11:09 CST 2019

Here is a one liner for cli upgrade:

Code:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I believe you are running an older kernel (just verified from the other thread posting), when you do the update look to see if one of the packages is an update to the linux kernel, once you update you will have to reboot to load the latest kernel. Let me know if you have any questions.

bishoptf · Feb 10, 2019

pickupman66 said:
OK. what code do I need to add to that file?

That link that @Ranjib was a little bit out of date, the module is named different now, try this:

The latest information is that to get the watchdog started on the RPi, you need to do this (based on this posting https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=147501&start=25#p1229897 Look for the post by paulv

In /boot/config.txt add/change: (sudo nano /boot/config.txt)

Code:

watchdog=on

In /etc/systemd/systemd.conf, change

Code:

#RuntimeWatchdogSec=
to:
RuntimeWatchdogSec=10s

reboot

pickupman66 · Feb 10, 2019

The systemd.conf file was empty. i checked both in the Pi file xplorer app and verified each change.

thanks for the one liner. I am comfortable with a comand line but just dont know the language and coding.

bishoptf · Feb 10, 2019

pickupman66 said:
The systemd.conf file was empty. i checked both in the Pi file xplorer app and verified each change.

thanks for the one liner. I am comfortable with a comand line but just dont know the language and coding.

No problem, you do want to get to the newer kernel, the updates should load that and more which I hope will kill the lockup issue.

The empty file was probably due to needing the watchdog=on addition in the config.txt file, once that is done, it needs to be rebooted to enable it.