reef-pi :: An opensource reef tank controller based on Raspberry Pi.

[SilverBulletPRN]

Calibrated the pH probe without any issues, the UI seemed pretty intuitive

 

[Simonv92]

Hi @Ranjib, I’ve a quick question: using a macro can I set a delay between 2 outputs? I mean.. I have return pump and skimmer pump. On every controller restart (for example after a power outage) I want my skimmer pump to start 1 minute after the return pump… or when I turn off the return pump it’ll shut off also the skimmer pump… is that possibile? Thank you!!
simone

 

[DWKDiver]

I used a float switch to do this. Float in sump a bit above normal water level. If the level is high then Skimmer is turned off, as in a restart as the return pump was off and now starts pumping water out off the sump. When the float drops the Skimmer turns on.

Hope this helps.

 

[elysics]

Just randomly looked at the github page and found a new release

The dreaded messed up graph timelines bug on reload with datapoints jumping back and forth seems to be gone. 2 scheduled DC motor dosers worked fine sof far which they didn't in 5.2.

Great work

 

[elysics]

Edited the ph stuff out from the previous post because i was still figuring stuff out switching between 5.1 and 5.3

but in 5.3, theres definitely some weirdness going on with the ph module.

All graphs go from left to right, so older data points to the left and newer data points to the right. Except for pH which goes the other way around. Both on the configuration that was carried over from 5.1 and a newly created one.

 

[Ranjib]

Edited the ph stuff out from the previous post because i was still figuring stuff out switching between 5.1 and 5.3

but in 5.3, theres definitely some weirdness going on with the ph module.

All graphs go from left to right, so older data points to the left and newer data points to the right. Except for pH which goes the other way around. Both on the configuration that was carried over from 5.1 and a newly created one.

thats a chart time sorting bug due to me overlooking. I think i 'll fix it and re-release 5.3. Is there any other thing you found weird/unexpected? Thank you for testing it out and taking the time to report back the issue

 

[elysics]

thats a chart time sorting bug due to me overlooking. I think i 'll fix it and re-release 5.3. Is there any other thing you found weird/unexpected? Thank you for testing it out and taking the time to report back the issue

Yeah i figured it was just a typo.

What was a remote IO error with the ph module in reefpi 5.1 is now a reported value of 0 (in the calibration menu). Not sure if that's intended, also the transform function is not applied to that 0. Calibration is applied to that 0 though, so it shows in the graph as 0.25 for me.


I kinda like the 0, means there's no missing time chunks in the graph, i just wish we could enforce graph scales

 

[elysics]

Oh and i removed a part of that comment again because i was confused with the behaviour, but yeah, transform function applies to the uncalibrated value, not the calibrated one, so with transform the raw sensor value is transformed and only after that calibrated. Probably makes sense for some transformations and not for others. Tried to have a minimum cutoff but i can still have that just have to shift the value around

 

[Ranjib]

Hive mind
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of 5.3 . This release ships with a decent size of the changelog. Primary focus of this release was to address several UI/UX bugs around calibration , charts, control setting that was annoying. We addressed bulk of those reported issues. As usual, there was community contributions as well. Many hugs goes to the contributors. Following are the highlights:



New features and enhancements:

• Users can now specify a transform expression to be applied on raw analog sensor reading (e.g. to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit). The transform function takes the shape of an arithmatic expression with a variable "v" interpreted as the raw analog sensor value. This feature is implemented using govaluate library that allows numerical values, arithmetic operators, parenthesis and more. Check the library manual for details. Just remember that reef-pi will inject the value of "v" as raw reading in the transform expression provided.
• Doser subsystem will now emit metrics and doser charts will reflect the same
• Error summary in the footer section now links to error section in configuration tab . Users can now just click and check the details of errors conveniently. contributed by @richievos
• Footer section will now show if the controller is running in dev mode, in red as warning. We hope this makes it easy to detect cases where users inadvertently enabled dev mode.
• Footer section will now include "year" information to represent current time. My personal requirement. Now after running reef-pi for 5+ years i miss the years in older screenshots. I felt given reef tanks last years.. it makes sense to have the year info in footer. Any screenshot that way will be amortized
• Driver loading error will be logged under errors section for users to review and assess. No more silent driver failures. Kasa powerstrip load failure like cases were harder to detect due to this. We hope this will make it easier for users to detect driver issues (since it also has timestamp, other than the exact error details).
• Connectors addition/update operation will now prompt only relevant driver choices (e.g. analog connectors will show only drivers with analog input pins in the driver options). Before this all drivers were being listed. This is a small user experience enhancements, suggested by another community member.

Chores

• Equipment entries will show outlet name (restoring older behavior)
• Get rid of spurious log section in the UI. It was there to capture UI errors and causes confusion with Configuration -> Errors tab.

Bug fixes

• Fixed doser calibration bug. Support volume based stepper motor calibration. Make calibration UI reflective of doser type (speed, duration for dcpumps and volume for steppers)
• Sort chart data with timestamp across all entities (ph, temperatures, ato etc). Unsorted data was causing bogus charts where new data would not line up on the time axis.
• Fix cpu usage notify target setting type.
• Make temperature target thresholds optional when control is not being used - contributed by @richievos
• Cron job validation through backend instead of ui - fix spurious cron schedule validation errors in the ui. Acceptable cron syntax like "*/3" was being rejected by UI validation. Given cron expression is rich and we have backend based validation, we decided to not do the cron syntax validation in ui and just use the backend. This is more sustainable and does not reduce the awesome cron capabilities

Release builds are available at usual location:

Release Analog sensor reading transformation · reef-pi/reef-pi

[feat] Users can now specify a transform expression to be applied on raw sensor reading (e.g. to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit) Doser subsystem will now emit metrics and doser charts will reflect...

github.com

reef-pi 4.0 or above users should be able to upgrade their installs directly through the UI. If you can please test and let us know if you have any feedback.

 

[Sral]

Hi @Ranjib , just updated from 5.2 to 5.3 and somehow the log Tab is gone. I could swear it was there before ... is there some setting to make that visible that I have missed ?

 

[Ranjib]

Hi @Ranjib , just updated from 5.2 to 5.3 and somehow the log Tab is gone. I could swear it was there before ... is there some setting to make that visible that I have missed ?

That is expected . We have removed it , as I mentioned in the release announcement. That log section was confusing , since it was only showing ui error that are transient and only for the specific browser session. The actual controller error log is under configuration section . Was there something useful for you in it ? We had to mostly for ui development

 

[Sral]

That is expected . We have removed it , as I mentioned in the release announcement. That log section was confusing , since it was only showing ui error that are transient and only for the specific browser session. The actual controller error log is under configuration section . Was there something useful for you in it ? We had to mostly for ui development

Ah, sry, should have read that more carefully XD

I looked up the UI errors that pop up, but I'm not fast enough to read+understand. Recently I had one that complained about an item ID1 ... took me a while to figure out that it was the temperature sensor that I deleted, but that was still "displayed" in the dashboard.
Maybe you can add those in the errors Tab in a future release, but give them their own section or hide them in a dropdown.

 

[dmsc2fs]

reef-pi 4.0 or above users should be able to upgrade their installs directly through the UI. If you can please test and let us know if you have any feedback.

Have any guides been posted no how to upgrade through the UI? Under Admin it says "Upgrade Reef-Pi to version" but the input box is empty and I'm not sure what would be place in it?

 

[Sral]

Just enter the desired version number

Have any guides been posted no how to upgrade through the UI? Under Admin it says "Upgrade Reef-Pi to version" but the input box is empty and I'm not sure what would be place in it?

Just enter the desired version number and hit the update button, then click ok. For me that was "5.3" (without quotation marks). It takes while to update though and it doesn't tell you when it's done.

At some point I rebooted (not sure if that's needed) afterwards it still displayed version 5.2 in the bottom of the page.
I hit update again twice and waited longer. Had a few reboots in between as well while I was testing other stuff and now it shows version 5.3

@Ranjib I would appreciate if that process would be a little more explained to the user, I felt a bit lost to whether it was doing something, or whether and when exactly I had to reboot ^^

 

[dmsc2fs]

Just enter the desired version number

Just enter the desired version number and hit the update button, then click ok. For me that was "5.3" (without quotation marks). It takes while to update though and it doesn't tell you when it's done.

At some point I rebooted (not sure if that's needed) afterwards it still displayed version 5.2 in the bottom of the page.
I hit update again twice and waited longer. Had a few reboots in between as well while I was testing other stuff and now it shows version 5.3

@Ranjib I would appreciate if that process would be a little more explained to the user, I felt a bit lost to whether it was doing something, or whether and when exactly I had to reboot ^^

I had thought of that but when I tried it I received: {"error":"Failed to update. Error: Unit reef-pi-install.service already exists."} | HTTP 500

I thought this was due to entering the wrong data into this input.

 

[Sral]

I had thought of that but when I tried it I received: {"error":"Failed to update. Error: Unit reef-pi-install.service already exists."} | HTTP 500

I thought this was due to entering the wrong data into this input.

I got the Same message. I rebooted and retried it I think.

 

[dmsc2fs]

I got the Same message. I rebooted and retried it I think.

This resolved the issue.

 

[Ranjib]

Have any guides been posted no how to upgrade through the UI? Under Admin it says "Upgrade Reef-Pi to version" but the input box is empty and I'm not sure what would be place in it?

just specify the version number :

5.3

 

[Ranjib]

Just enter the desired version number

Just enter the desired version number and hit the update button, then click ok. For me that was "5.3" (without quotation marks). It takes while to update though and it doesn't tell you when it's done.

At some point I rebooted (not sure if that's needed) afterwards it still displayed version 5.2 in the bottom of the page.
I hit update again twice and waited longer. Had a few reboots in between as well while I was testing other stuff and now it shows version 5.3

@Ranjib I would appreciate if that process would be a little more explained to the user, I felt a bit lost to whether it was doing something, or whether and when exactly I had to reboot ^^

i appreciate this feedback
you know there was a time when users had to literally download and run dpkg to install reef-pi , through terminal. its nice to hear new asks, but against the new normal.
I'll see what i can do. priority will be on bugs, followed by mission critical new features, hard to see it becoming p0 till next major release, but this is definitely worth tracking, I want to improve the upgrade UX

rule of thumb, for any upgrade, generally a single reboot is more than enough for a single attempt. Whats more important is to shift-refresh browser to get rid of stale data. The front end code is always cached in the browser.

 

[Ranjib]

I had thought of that but when I tried it I received: {"error":"Failed to update. Error: Unit reef-pi-install.service already exists."} | HTTP 500

I thought this was due to entering the wrong data into this input.

this can happen during upgrade (due to reef-pi being busy with some device operation that is harder to kill from the upgrade process). Reboot should always resolve this. If reboot does not resolve, then attempt to upgrade again. But multiple reboot for a single upgrade attempt is not meaningful to my understanding
Always refresh broswer in between upgrades, reloads. Else it can and will show stale data for some time