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

[rushbattle]

Congrats on getting situated. What I would do for a garage!!

Garages are like money, you can never have enough, and not having any is a real drag.

 

[bishoptf]

Garages are like money, you can never have enough, and not having any is a real drag.

I agree I do all the work on my cars and my belief you can never have too big of a garage, when the cars are in the garage not much room to do much. My workspace is in the basement backroom, I still need to clean out more junk, I have way to much computer electronics stuff that I need to clean out.

 

[Diamond1]

Some update on the ongoing hal development (hardware abstraction layer)
1) Users should be able to add new hardware driver through UI. This will be used to add new ph boards, base board, mcp23017 based GPIO expanders and what not (PAR sensors ??? :). A driver has a name, type (currently only rpi and pca9685 will be supported) and configuration (UI not developed yet). Type is used to decipher pin count, capabilities etc.

2) Once added , each driver and pin(s) are associated with connectors. Connectors will always be backed by driver (rpi default). Inlet (digital inputs like float sensors), outlet (digital output like relays), jacks (DC pwm output, aka variable voltage) are always associated with a driver.

Pardon the un-aligned UI. One of us (@Zekth, looking at you buddy ;-)), will clean it up once we have the whole story implemented.

Very cool this opens lots of doors for testing and expansion!

 

[Ranjib]

Yeah. This is the first time I have access to a garage :)
Wife was pretty tolerant about my tiny lab at one corner of the dining room till now.
My apartment move broke pretty much all of my acro colonies. I took the opportunity to get rid of some of the bigger pieces (bubble, frogspawn, monti cap ) as well. They found good homes to local reefing community. There are newer folks who absolutely love those pieces. Tank is pretty different looking now. I took this opportunity to revisit the rockscape as well. Its still needs lot of work (and currently going through some cyano period).

I saved pretty much all the corals, including the broken acro colonies. I have cleared up some premium space. Now that reef-pi doser module is functional and I have almost 3 years of experience with reef keeping, I think I'll go for a battle box.

My zoa island +acan

Lepto, strawberry shortcake colony (move out from premium space to down below)

micro goniopora colony (stings its neighbors all the time)

I have mixed feeling overall. I miss the old fully grown out tank, but I also look forward to grow some harder keep acros, and with a bit more thoughtout rockscape and coral placement (less aggression related issues)

 

[rushbattle]

Yeah. This is the first time I have access to a garage :)
Wife was pretty tolerant about my tiny lab at one corner of the dining room till now.
My apartment move broke pretty much all of my acro colonies. I took the opportunity to get rid of some of the bigger pieces (bubble, frogspawn, monti cap ) as well. They found good homes to local reefing community. There are newer folks who absolutely love those pieces. Tank is pretty different looking now. I took this opportunity to revisit the rockscape as well. Its still needs lot of work (and currently going through some cyano period).

I saved pretty much all the corals, including the broken acro colonies. I have cleared up some premium space. Now that reef-pi doser module is functional and I have almost 3 years of experience with reef keeping, I think I'll go for a battle box.

My zoa island +acan

Lepto, strawberry shortcake colony (move out from premium space to down below)

micro goniopora colony (stings its neighbors all the time)

I have mixed feeling overall. I miss the old fully grown out tank, but I also look forward to grow some harder keep acros, and with a bit more thoughtout rockscape and coral placement (less aggression related issues)

Still looks better than my tank! I am sure with Adam's frags you will do well, they come in nice and healthy, colorful and growing.

 

[Ranjib]

Very cool this opens lots of doors for testing and expansion!

Thank you. To name a few, following is our tentative goals for 3.0, that exploit this feature
- Support for multiple PCA9685
- Using PWM pins (pca9685 or pi) as outlets (cause they can be switched back and forth 0 or 100%)
- support for @Roberto_b's ph board
- support for @theatrus 's pico base board
- support of MCP23017 IO expander (more inlets & outlets)
- Probably support for smart outlets (strech goal)

 

[Diamond1]

You tank looks great. It's always tough to move a tank looks like you were successful in doing so.

 

[Ranjib]

You tank looks great. It's always tough to move a tank looks like you were successful in doing so.

For me the biggest bummer was I ran out of storage containers, and fresh RO/DI supply. I had three tanks, one nano and two pico, and not enough buckets/storage to transport them all separately, which is what caused the breaking. I think bigger rock structures are just hard to transport. This time I have made the rockscape as an assembly of few larger pieces that I can separate. Lets see what happens.. for next couple of months at least I have my work cut out.. it will be cyano vs me. Diligent water changes and manual removal of as much of cyano as possible, while the tank's microbial population settle to deter cyano naturally.

 

[Diamond1]

You tank looks great. It's always tough to move a tank looks like you were successful in doing so.

For me the biggest bummer was I ran out of storage containers, and fresh RO/DI supply. I had three tanks, one nano and two pico, and not enough buckets/storage to transport them all separately, which is what caused the breaking. I think bigger rock structures are just hard to transport. This time I have made the rockscape as an assembly of few larger pieces that I can separate. Lets see what happens.. for next couple of months at least I have my work cut out.. it will be cyano vs me. Diligent water changes and manual removal of as much of cyano as possible, while the tank's microbial population settle to deter cyano naturally.[/QUOTE

I'm sure you'll get the upperhand on the cyano quickly and your tanks will be looking great sooner than you think.

 

[rushbattle]

For me the biggest bummer was I ran out of storage containers, and fresh RO/DI supply. I had three tanks, one nano and two pico, and not enough buckets/storage to transport them all separately, which is what caused the breaking. I think bigger rock structures are just hard to transport. This time I have made the rockscape as an assembly of few larger pieces that I can separate. Lets see what happens.. for next couple of months at least I have my work cut out.. it will be cyano vs me. Diligent water changes and manual removal of as much of cyano as possible, while the tank's microbial population settle to deter cyano naturally.

I noticed that cyano feeds on detritus directly quite well. Finding a way to cut down detritus levels like sand vacuuming, powerfiltering, etc, might help.

 

[Ranjib]

I noticed that cyano feeds on detritus directly quite well. Finding a way to cut down detritus levels like sand vacuuming, powerfiltering, etc, might help.

I dont have a sandbed. Its barebottom. I have skimmer and chemical filtration in place. I felt algae is more of a detritous issue, dino a silicate issue and cyano to be a nutrient balance issue. Everytime I make some changes that distrurbs the nutrient balance, cyano appears, particularly around the battle zones where two adjacent corals are fighting for space

 

[Diamond1]

Also pointing a powerhead at it helps too. I use a turkey baster to suck it up.

 

[rushbattle]

I dont have a sandbed. Its barebottom. I have skimmer and chemical filtration in place. I felt algae is more of a detritous issue, dino a silicate issue and cyano to be a nutrient balance issue. Everytime I make some changes that distrurbs the nutrient balance, cyano appears, particularly around the battle zones where two adjacent corals are fighting for space

You have it under control, just hoping to give help if I can. I have found powerfilters to be super effective against cyano, even running one temporarily in the display if necessary. With your smart sandless setup it is much easier to control the system.
http://dsrreefing.com/powerfilter/

 

[theatrus]

Yeah. This is the first time I have access to a garage :)
Wife was pretty tolerant about my tiny lab at one corner of the dining room till now.
My apartment move broke pretty much all of my acro colonies. I took the opportunity to get rid of some of the bigger pieces (bubble, frogspawn, monti cap ) as well. They found good homes to local reefing community. There are newer folks who absolutely love those pieces. Tank is pretty different looking now. I took this opportunity to revisit the rockscape as well. Its still needs lot of work (and currently going through some cyano period).

I saved pretty much all the corals, including the broken acro colonies. I have cleared up some premium space. Now that reef-pi doser module is functional and I have almost 3 years of experience with reef keeping, I think I'll go for a battle box.

My zoa island +acan

Lepto, strawberry shortcake colony (move out from premium space to down below)

micro goniopora colony (stings its neighbors all the time)

I have mixed feeling overall. I miss the old fully grown out tank, but I also look forward to grow some harder keep acros, and with a bit more thoughtout rockscape and coral placement (less aggression related issues)

Looking very nice.

One thing I’ve learned is that less is more. My 90g probably has 1/4 of the rock it had at its peak, and it’s better for it. Still deciding what to put in my 22 long.

 

[Sebastian Stankiewicz]

I am new to the whole diy electronics thing still, but have managed to get a temperature and Ph sensor attached to the reef-pi software. Currently i have a raspirobot v3 that I am using as the driver for two peristaltic pumps. Unfortunately, I cannot get the raspirobot to communicate with the reef-pi UI. I have entered the pin numbers as specified on their github page (https://github.com/simonmonk/raspirobotboard3), but still no luck. I also enabled the PCA9685 driver, but still nothing. I was wondering if anyone could help me out? Or if anyone has had experience with the raspirobot?

 

[DirtDiggler2823]

Lot of thing happened in past few weeks. One of them was the apartment move. Now I have a garage :-). So I guess this will be the official unofficial reef-pi laboratories :-)

Rigorous testing is in progress . And for some reason Batman decided to drop by and say hi

Adorable!

 

[LionHeart2017]

Seems my ip of the raspberry has changed, can't get into now through vnc or find reef-pi through a browser, it's running fine, I set a host name for the raspberry but alas I can't seem to get that to work either, I go into my router and it's listed with the hostname I gave the raspberry but still cannot access it with that

 

[DirtDiggler2823]

@Bigtrout @Ranjib , can 2 thermometers be run off of the basic audio jack splitter? Can more than two be run this way, or do I have to splice everything to hang off of the same 3.5mm jack?

 

[daveCB]

Hi All - I am attempting to get AdaFruit IO established and keep hitting brick walls. I have scoured the board and help files and think I am close.

1. I have my AdaFruit IO account established, know the UserID and the IO Key and have entered that info into Reef-Pi (2.0)
2. It appears that the Reef Pi is hitting the IO account since these IO feeds got created (not sure why I have so many)

3. I am getting the following errors in Reef Pi

4. None of the feeds contain any data

So I am open for ideas.

 

[Ranjib]

@Bigtrout @Ranjib , can 2 thermometers be run off of the basic audio jack splitter? Can more than two be run this way, or do I have to splice everything to hang off of the same 3.5mm jack?

Should be fine. I have never tried it though