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

[Diamond1]

Hi, I have been reading this thread for a few days, and love the fantastic work on reef pi. Great job Ranjib!

I am a freshwater planted tank guy, but reef pi is just what I am looking for when I change over to a sump filter soon. I am planning a build once Santa comes!

Welcome to R2R! Have fun with the build and keep us posted.

 

[Ranjib]

Hi, I have been reading this thread for a few days, and love the fantastic work on reef pi. Great job Ranjib!

I am a freshwater planted tank guy, but reef pi is just what I am looking for when I change over to a sump filter soon. I am planning a build once Santa comes!

Thank you for considering reef-pi, and a warm welcome to reef2reef

 

[Bigtrout]

Thank you for considering reef-pi, and a warm welcome to reef2reef

Thank you,
I plan on building in stages because as of now I have 3 big canisters on a 75 gallon tank, but will be changing to a 40 breeder sump soon.

I got started looking into controllers after having one heater fail off, and another failing on, but was home and caught it. For now I am using an stc1000 as a failsafe, but I want to be able to remotely monitor my tanks. I looked into esp8266 sonoffs flashed to tasmota but that leaves too many failure points. I prefer a one controller solution.

Then I found reef pi, modular, setup is customizable to my situation, able to vpn into my home network to monitor, able to set email alerts....so far it looks like the best solution short of a very expensive apex!

I plan on power and temp controller first, then a pwm control of my lights. It will be interesting because my led lights are circuited as common cathode so i will have to use the PCA9685 module to fire PNP mosfets to control them. After my sump goes in possibly pwm of the return pump and some water level monitoring because I cant drill the tank without a big teardown so reef pi can be an additional failsafe for a hob overflow(in addition to proper sump and tank calculations so that the setup CANT overflow onto the floor)

I will start a build thread when I start building!

I have experience as both an electrician and electronic technician so the build will be fun, but has anyone used the ML reefkeepers hat for reef pi...it has everything i need except the PNP mosfet switching prebuilt into one hat, and would be a timesaver and make a cleaner build?

RPI Hat for reef-pi

Supports

• Back powering the rpi with 5v
• 9 channels of PWM control via PCA9685 (split between 3 connectors)
• 3 channels for 1 wire communication (up to 3 DS18B20 temperature probes)
• 2 i2c ports for ph probe modules
• 2 ATO sensors
• 8 channel 12v relay control via ULN2803
• 8 GPIO breakout (intended for 3.3v relay module)

 

[Jonathan Troutt]

Thank you,
I plan on building in stages because as of now I have 3 big canisters on a 75 gallon tank, but will be changing to a 40 breeder sump soon.

I got started looking into controllers after having one heater fail off, and another failing on, but was home and caught it. For now I am using an stc1000 as a failsafe, but I want to be able to remotely monitor my tanks. I looked into esp8266 sonoffs flashed to tasmota but that leaves too many failure points. I prefer a one controller solution.

Then I found reef pi, modular, setup is customizable to my situation, able to vpn into my home network to monitor, able to set email alerts....so far it looks like the best solution short of a very expensive apex!

I plan on power and temp controller first, then a pwm control of my lights. It will be interesting because my led lights are circuited as common cathode so i will have to use the PCA9685 module to fire PNP mosfets to control them. After my sump goes in possibly pwm of the return pump and some water level monitoring because I cant drill the tank without a big teardown so reef pi can be an additional failsafe for a hob overflow(in addition to proper sump and tank calculations so that the setup CANT overflow onto the floor)

I will start a build thread when I start building!

I have experience as both an electrician and electronic technician so the build will be fun, but has anyone used the ML reefkeepers hat for reef pi...it has everything i need except the PNP mosfet switching prebuilt into one hat, and would be a timesaver and make a cleaner build?

RPI Hat for reef-pi

Supports

• Back powering the rpi with 5v
• 9 channels of PWM control via PCA9685 (split between 3 connectors)
• 3 channels for 1 wire communication (up to 3 DS18B20 temperature probes)
• 2 i2c ports for ph probe modules
• 2 ATO sensors
• 8 channel 12v relay control via ULN2803
• 8 GPIO breakout (intended for 3.3v relay module)

Um pictures of your tank please. I really like large freshwater planted tanks. Especially if they are discus in them.

 

[Bigtrout]

Heres a few tank pics, no discus, but how bout angels and tetras...and yes there are some glofish, have to keep the wife happy. Sorry the vals need trimmed, they are my nitrate removal system...i trim them back to tank height once a week and throw away a 2 gallon bucket of trimmings and spreading vals once every 2 weeks. I dont fertilize or do co2 instead using the fish to fertilize the plants in return for being able to overstock big time!

 

[Jonathan Troutt]

Heres a few tank pics, no discus, but how bout angels and tetras...and yes there are some glofish, have to keep the wife happy. Sorry the vals need trimmed, they are my nitrate removal system...i trim them back to tank height once a week and throw away a 2 gallon bucket of trimmings once every 2 weeks. I dont fertilize or do co2 instead using the fish to fertilize the plants in return for being able to overstock big time!

Man that’s awesome!! Totally amazing!

 

[Ranjib]

Heres a few tank pics, no discus, but how bout angels and tetras...and yes there are some glofish, have to keep the wife happy. Sorry the vals need trimmed, they are my nitrate removal system...i trim them back to tank height once a week and throw away a 2 gallon bucket of trimmings and spreading vals once every 2 weeks. I dont fertilize or do co2 instead using the fish to fertilize the plants in return for being able to overstock big time!

Awesome tank, and yes, happy wife == happy life :-)

I have not tried any of the hats yet, I have @wykat 's hat that I'll have to solder when I get time (busy with apartment move right now). The hat you are referring to is designed by @Michael Lane , his build thread is here , he is also one of the code contributors who did a significant amount of work to improve the reef-pi UI as part of 2.0 release.

 

[Bigtrout]

Awesome tank, and yes, happy wife == happy life :)

I have not tried any of the hats yet, I have @wykat 's hat that I'll have to solder when I get time (busy with apartment move right now). The hat you are referring to is designed by @Michael Lane , his build thread is here , he is also one of the code contributors who did a significant amount of work to improve the reef-pi UI as part of 2.0 release.

Thats great so buying that hat means I will be helping out someone who helps with reef pi! I didnt connect the ML reefkeepers with Mike Lane...so I already know the hat will be nicely designed one. For my tank its perfect and lets me focus on other parts of the build.

For running reef pi headless is a pi zero w adequate or would I be better off starting with a 3A+ or B+ for future features on the horizon?

 

[Ranjib]

Thats great so buying that hat means I will be helping out someone who helps with reef pi! I didnt connect the ML reefkeepers with Mike Lane...so I already know the hat will be nicely designed one. For my tank its perfect and lets me focus on other parts of the build.

For running reef pi headless is a pi zero w adequate or would I be better off starting with a 3A+ or B+ for future features on the horizon?

Pi zero is more than enough for headless use

 

[That Crusso Kid]

Heres a few tank pics, no discus, but how bout angels and tetras...and yes there are some glofish, have to keep the wife happy. Sorry the vals need trimmed, they are my nitrate removal system...i trim them back to tank height once a week and throw away a 2 gallon bucket of trimmings and spreading vals once every 2 weeks. I dont fertilize or do co2 instead using the fish to fertilize the plants in return for being able to overstock big time!

Very nice looking tank!
I set up a 55g freshwater for my wife. It's more of an "artificial" set up as that's what she likes. Strangely enough, I still do not have a SW tank set up yet and l, due to financial constraints, probably won't for a while.

 

[b4tn]

I’m thinking it’s time to step up the build on my reef-pi

 

[Jonathan Troutt]

I’m thinking it’s time to step up the build on my reef-pi

What happened?

 

[Jonathan Troutt]

@Ranjib

Hey so keeping an eye on cpu and memory use since I’ve been monitoring temp there is a steady increase of memory use. Is this normal? I was assuming that is was showing ram stats. I assumed that tam usage would stay consistent for the most part.

 

[Ranjib]

I’m thinking it’s time to step up the build on my reef-pi

It will be cool to have a similar lcd (16x2 char) support in reef-pi

 

[Ranjib]

@Ranjib

Hey so keeping an eye on cpu and memory use since I’ve been monitoring temp there is a steady increase of memory use. Is this normal? I was assuming that is was showing ram stats. I assumed that tam usage would stay consistent for the most part.

It’s nowhere near to be concerned now, but yes ideally memory should never creep up. But that ideal, in reality the Linux is running more than a dozen process and and it’s highly unlikely all of them act ideal (including reef-pi). Hence, you’ll see such memory creep, but they should show some pattern and die of after a time (gc, restarts etc) or hit a plateau sometime it takes couple of weeks to observe this pattern. As long as it’s not hitting the roof (say 100mb ) you should not be worried

 

[b4tn]

What happened?

Nothing, yet... but every time I do a water change the screen gets goofier and goofier looking. I don’t trust it right now. I am very close to finishing my build at least my interim build while I build another lol.

 

[b4tn]

It will be cool to have a similar lcd (16x2 char) support in reef-pi

That would be cool. Is this something in the works?

 

[Ranjib]

That would be cool. Is this something in the works?

Nothing near time :-/ . Have our priorities lined up. But this is relatively easy, i had started working on something similar, I have the driver code etc ready for it but never integrated it with reef-pi.

 

[Diamond1]

I’m thinking it’s time to step up the build on my reef-pi

Is it just me or does that error code look like a dog getting rained on?
Hope it lasts till you get your reef-pi online.

 

[Erica-Renee]

Heres a few tank pics, no discus, but how bout angels and tetras...and yes there are some glofish, have to keep the wife happy. Sorry the vals need trimmed, they are my nitrate removal system...i trim them back to tank height once a week and throw away a 2 gallon bucket of trimmings and spreading vals once every 2 weeks. I dont fertilize or do co2 instead using the fish to fertilize the plants in return for being able to overstock big time!

This is a Amazing tank .. We have a 40 gallon breeder (gupply land) Planted tank as well as the 240 reef tank...

Welcome to the REEF-PI Controller thread and REEF TO REEF.. There are some very talented and amazing people in here awaiting to help you with any issue you have ..

Good Luck ...