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

[Gareth elliott]

The temperature probe is rather finicky in my experience, picks a lot of noise. If i turn off my pi and turn back on i get periods of no readings. I wonder what vertex will use or if a digital isolator would enhance its reliability?

 

[Ranjib]

Not sure if this is a functional issue or a bug, but I haven’t changed the pin out or anything on the temp sensor. I have A 4.7k resistor on the signal pin. It was displaying accurate temps all morning however now it just displays temps from 14:55 this after noon. Any ideas?

Did you change anything ? Mine ones does that sometime when I first deploy them. But none have shown it after they start running.. for almost 3 months now. I would suggest either reconnecting the sensor or restating pi (power on/off) or just touch the probe and put it back again.

 

[Ranjib]

Not sure if this is a functional issue or a bug, but I haven’t changed the pin out or anything on the temp sensor. I have A 4.7k resistor on the signal pin. It was displaying accurate temps all morning however now it just displays temps from 14:55 this after noon. Any ideas?

If you are not using the camera module, you can disable it from Configuration -> Settings -> Capabilities

 

[Ranjib]

Friends,
we hit a milestone today. reef-pi is celebrating its 1 year anniversary at reef2reef. Without the community, and all your support this would not be possible. I would like to express my heartful gratitude for every single visitors of this page and every single builder who gave this project a shot. Let me also use this moment to share some stats and numbers , to give you an idea how far we have come, in terms of software, user experience, and outreach:

reef-pi was originated as a DIY hack (originally called reefer) to fix my kessil controller issue. Later I ended up adding power controller (ac socket control) to ease my water change chores. It was during that time, i felt community could use what I am using, particularly those who has the DIY spriti (and I knew reef community has probably the most skilled DIY hackers). My first and in retrospect probably the best move was to start a thread in reef2reef and streamline the hardwere against raspberry pi (reefer was written to run on any small board inlcuding beaglebone or galileo). This thread has grown into probably one of the highest viewed DIY thread in reef2reef.

The very first release of reef-pi was named reef2reef, Feb 22, 2017 . reef-pi went into a regular cadence of releases since then with 1 minor release every two weeks after. We had total 25 releases till now, each of them shipping a tiny bit of improvements and bug fixes. Just to bring some perspective, reef-pi first release had no way to add or remove any device using UI. it was all configuration file driven. Our very first builder @Aaron Smith spent more than a week just to get it going (thank you Aaron).

reef-pi first major public recognition came in May, during Bay area makerfaire, where I put couple of my pico tanks along side reef-pi as an exhibit. reef-pi booth was one of the most visited exhibits, and we won Editor's choice award due to that (although I should attribute it to the corals glowing in dark room, rather than reef-pi, but hey, it was due to reef-pi I could make a case for it).

In June 2017, reef-pi website was launched. Sticking to its core opensource philosophy, the website along with all documentations is kept open for everyone to improve and iterate on. There is still a long way to go, but the comprehensive guides have significantly brought down the initial setup complexity, we literally have folks who get it working in days or hours now, once they have all the electronics (again the Bill of material has helped there). The documentation has been improved by at least four other external contributors (all are reef2reef users). We have visitors across the globe reading through the guides, and the pageviews are increasing steadily.

In past one year, I have personally built around 7 controllers, I have recycled at least 3 of them and tore down 1. Currently, I run 3 of them. This thread has some details of at least 17 other builds, one form or other, they all use some functionalities of reef-pi. This gives me immense amount of joy :-0)

reef-pi 1.0 was released last Christmas, offering features that ease basic reef keeping chores (power control, LED daylight cycle, temperature control, ATO and alert/telemetry). We are working hard on 2.0 release in this x-mas which will bring dosers (already released), wave maker, ph probe, multiple temperature/ato sensor support, camera control and programmable UIs. These features intended to support advanced reef keeping, SPS husbandry in particular. The growth of reef-pi also represents my personal understanding of this complex hobby (and the maturity of my reef tanks).

I want to extend my and gratititude to @Ryan115 @Cary and other who have step up helping new builders in this thread. Thank you folks


Onto 2.0 milestone ..

 

[Ranjib]

Schematic of dosing module electronics:

Theoretically, this is very similar to LED controller. i.e. we generate 5 volt pwm, and then boost it to 12v to power dosing pumps. Couple of main differences here is
1) I am using Pi zero hardware timer straight , instead of pca9685 chip to generate 5 v pwm. This is not a necessary step, if anyone has pca9685, they can use it instead as well.
2) I am using l293d , a dual bridge darlignton transistor IC to covert 5v pwm to 12v. This is necessary. Unlike kessil lights control signals, dosing pumps draw a lot of power. This particular IC support thats (600ma) . Apart from that, this IC also provide directional controls (forward or reverse) and has two outputs (can control both dosing pumps for my two part dosing regimen). These are very popular dc motor drivers,

 

[binay]

Ranjib can I use a single jack with ten pin numbers for my diy led lighting. I need 10 pwm signals to my meanwell ldd.

 

[Ranjib]

Ranjib can I use a single jack with ten pin numbers for my diy led lighting. I need 10 pwm signals to my meanwell ldd.

You can. What connector you are planning to use? Rj45, hdmi are good choices

 

[HM3105]

Coding updates,
last couple of days, i was working on to get an rpi hardware timer based pwm driver working. Couple of posts earlier I mentioned the recent availability of the 2 hardware timers from rpi, which we can use to generate pwm . What this means for us is as long as we want only two dimmable dc output (like individual doser, kessil controllers etc), we can do it reliably just using raspberry pi zero/3. no need for pca9685 IC. this will bring the cost 10-14$ less, save power, space and circuit complexity.

Anyway... i got the library working: https://github.com/reef-pi/rpi/tree/master/pwm
will be working on to integrating this with reef-pi, while I wait for the ph probe . I have received the jebao pp4 , so I might take the rpi pwm driver based code to power the new doser or wave maker.

Still working through thread but as a person who uses Jebao for most of my gear very interested in using RPI to control these.

 

[TMB]

Congrats @Ranjib on the anniversary!!!:)

Made some more progress on the RPI yesterday.
Everything is complete and working/tested except the 11ov side of the power bar. I’ll complete that today.

If you look closely you can see the simplified temp circuit (no bread board), the resister is soldered into the connector in the case.

The second HDMI is for a future power bar, but for 8 is enough for what I want to do.
I also want to caution anyone thinking about using HDMI to power their RPI as I have. The current carrying capacity of the HDMI cable needs to be taken into account, or you could end up with a BIG problem. If you look closely you can see that I’m using 3 of the cables to carry the power to RPI. Please be careful with this method if you choose it!

I think this is about as small as I could make the base unit without making a custom PCB. Let me know what you guys think of the build.

TMB

 

[philshel]

Manning our local club booth in coral farmers market today ,

Guess who is here :)
@jfox

Some of my local club members were going this weekend, I didn't realize we were almost neighbors.

 

[Ranjib]

Congrats @Ranjib on the anniversary!!!:)

Made some more progress on the RPI yesterday.
Everything is complete and working/tested except the 11ov side of the power bar. I’ll complete that today.

If you look closely you can see the simplified temp circuit (no bread board), the resister is soldered into the connector in the case.

The second HDMI is for a future power bar, but for 8 is enough for what I want to do.
I also want to caution anyone thinking about using HDMI to power their RPI as I have. The current carrying capacity of the HDMI cable needs to be taken into account, or you could end up with a BIG problem. If you look closely you can see that I’m using 3 of the cables to carry the power to RPI. Please be careful with this method if you choose it!

I think this is about as small as I could make the base unit without making a custom PCB. Let me know what you guys think of the build.

TMB

Love it.
I see a resistor soldered into the audio connector directly. Assuming this is for the temperature probe, its really neat idea :-) . I can see how you have eliminated the need of a perfboard completely.

So this build will do power control and temperature control right? No LED or ATO stuff.

 

[TMB]

Love it.
I see a resistor soldered into the audio connector directly. Assuming this is for the temperature probe, its really neat idea :) . I can see how you have eliminated the need of a perfboard completely.

So this build will do power control and temperature control right? No LED or ATO stuff.

Yup, no perfboard;) . I will be adding the ATO function soon via a small audio connector. I have MH lights, so no need for the lighting control for me. Thank you for the compliments!

 

[ReeferMadness88]

Congratulations on the anniversary! This project has fascinated me since I stumbled across it looking for projects for the couple Raspi’s I had sitting around. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I could hack together a DIY controller with your software. I’m so excited to see what future revisions and updates bring in the form of functionality. Reading the post to see the humble beginnings was great, it’s amazing how much this has developed in such a short time. I’m happy to be apart of the future!

 

[Ranjib]

Yup, no perfboard;) . I will be adding the ATO function soon via a small audio connector. I have MH lights, so no need for the lighting control for me. Thank you for the compliments!

MHs are great, I am having such a hard time with shading with my kessil pendants :-( . MHs are great for ambient light

 

[Ranjib]

Congratulations on the anniversary! This project has fascinated me since I stumbled across it looking for projects for the couple Raspi’s I had sitting around. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I could hack together a DIY controller with your software. I’m so excited to see what future revisions and updates bring in the form of functionality. Reading the post to see the humble beginnings was great, it’s amazing how much this has developed in such a short time. I’m happy to be apart of the future!

Thanks for the kind words. Nice setup you have there. Careful with the AC wiring.

 

[ReeferMadness88]

Thanks for the kind words. Nice setup you have there. Careful with the AC wiring.

Thank you! Yeah it’s basicaly like working inside a pinball machine. Just avoid the line voltage lol I have the box hinged and latched closed I won’t assume I will need to be messing around in there too much once the components are all. If only China shipped quicker

 

[HM3105]

congrats on one year, Reef-Pi is still running my 110 successfully without any issues.

 

[sector9]

I'm running in to issues with the timers on my reef-pi. I just upgraded this weekend from 1.1 to 1.3. I understand that the timers section got an upgrade. Initially, everything just worked after the upgrade because I didn't need to make any modifications. However, I need to now redo some of the timers. So I deleted some of the old timers (which didn't give me any error message) but now that I am trying to add new timers, I get the following error message: "{"error":"json: cannot unmarshal object into Go struct field Job.equipment of type string"}"
I saw another post back on page 153 about the same error (https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/reef-pi-one-year-anniversary.289256/page-153) and I found the binary script to use. I used that script for the pi3 which seemed to work without any obvious error messages. However, I still have the same problem and can't add any timers. Any suggestions?

Here's what the log says when I try to add a timer:
Feb 11 21:28:05 reefpi reef-pi[1188]: 2018/02/11 21:28:05 ERROR: json: cannot unmarshal object into Go struct field Job.equipment of type string
Feb 11 21:28:05 reefpi reef-pi[1188]: 2018/02/11 21:28:05 &{ 0 * 08 0 false Blues on}

 

[Ranjib]

I'm running in to issues with the timers on my reef-pi. I just upgraded this weekend from 1.1 to 1.3. I understand that the timers section got an upgrade. Initially, everything just worked after the upgrade because I didn't need to make any modifications. However, I need to now redo some of the timers. So I deleted some of the old timers (which didn't give me any error message) but now that I am trying to add new timers, I get the following error message: "{"error":"json: cannot unmarshal object into Go struct field Job.equipment of type string"}"
I saw another post back on page 153 about the same error (https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/reef-pi-one-year-anniversary.289256/page-153) and I found the binary script to use. I used that script for the pi3 which seemed to work without any obvious error messages. However, I still have the same problem and can't add any timers. Any suggestions?

Here's what the log says when I try to add a timer:
Feb 11 21:28:05 reefpi reef-pi[1188]: 2018/02/11 21:28:05 ERROR: json: cannot unmarshal object into Go struct field Job.equipment of type string
Feb 11 21:28:05 reefpi reef-pi[1188]: 2018/02/11 21:28:05 &{ 0 * 08 0 false Blues on}

sorry about your trouble. Can you try reloading reef-pi and see if that resolve the issue.
If that does not fix things , try this:

curl -u <username>:<password> -X DELETE http://<IP>/api/timers/<ID>

change the username, password, IP. You try can try with ID 1 to 10
do you know how many timers you had?

 

[sector9]

sorry about your trouble. Can you try reloading reef-pi and see if that resolve the issue.
If that does not fix things , try this:

curl -u <username>:<password> -X DELETE http://<IP>/api/timers/<ID>

change the username, password, IP. You try can try with ID 1 to 10
do you know how many timers you had?

Thanks for your help. I tried reloading and rebooting without improvement. I used to have 6 timers in place. I tried the curl command as above for ID 1-10 and got the following output for each one "{"error":"Failed to delete. Error: Cron ID not found for job ID:1"}". I am assuming that this output means that those timers have been successfully removed?

Unfortunately, I am still unable to add new timers :(