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

[Ranjib]

Yes , thanksgiving is the target date . I am in process of updating the adafruit guides for that reason. Expect those to go live around same time (may be couple of days before or after)

I think I have posted it here. To use the Wifi outlets, add a driver with the proper type (only hs103,hs110,hs300 supported) and add IP:9999 as address. Then proceed to create outlets with that driver

 

[hhaase]

I went with those because I didn’t know how the circuit will end up at the end. I can use them to feed 24/12/5v and get 10,12,5,3.3 out which I covers my entire range of use case. And their 3a rating helps as well. I definitely think you should tinker with better more appropriate converters. Unless we tinker we’ll never know. If you ask me , our current power circuitry is not good and I know for a fact things get dodgy (10v pwm) in all in one circuits.
My theory is that we need lots of passive (resistors and capacitors) to make things smooth , other than better converters . From power distribution perspective.

Any help in this regard will be tremendously useful

A lot of the issue may also come from using a switching regulator, as opposed to a linear. Switchers can be noisy, but I can start testing circuits with the scope to see what might be noisy. A weak grounding circuit can also play a lot into that. Tying everything into a single PCB will help with grounding quite a lot, since there is such a robust ground between the Pi itself and any hat boards.

I'll know better in about two weeks. Generating the files now, ordering shortly. I don't think I have enough posts yet to link images. Just shooting for a workable prototype at the moment anyway but I think it's looking clean for a quick night of work.

 

[Bigtrout]

Tried the new release today (reef-pi-3.0.0-rc0-pi3.deb), temp sensors seem to be working better this go. I did notice that one of my lights instantly pegged to 100% across all channels (using a PCA9685 with ldd-H meanwells). The config I had works correctly on 3.0 alpha and the 2.x builds but the latest two 3.0 builds have behaved this way. I did attempt to see if the active high/low was the issue but flipping it to active low goes to light out. The other two changed when I edited the profile but did not modify an actual value. I caught this when viewing the systemctl for reef-pi. The start times are correct but the "15:04:05" time is unknown to me as any gui entry. The profiles are using diurnal and should be outputting a value in the 40's roughly (blues at least). Has anyone seen this on the latest build?


Nov 13 18:39:44 raspberrypi reef-pi[14375]: 2019/11/13 18:39:44 ERROR: lighting subsystem. Profile value computation error. Light: RightLEDLight channel: Violets Error: Failed to parse start time. Error:parsing time "09:15" as "15:04:05":
Nov 13 18:39:44 raspberrypi reef-pi[14375]: 2019/11/13 18:39:44 lighting subsystem: Setting Light: RightLEDLight Channel: Violets Value: 0
Nov 13 18:39:44 raspberrypi reef-pi[14375]: 2019/11/13 18:39:44 lighting-subsystem: Setting PWM value: 0 at channel: 8
Nov 13 18:39:44 raspberrypi reef-pi[14375]: 2019/11/13 18:39:44 onTime 0 offTime 4095
Nov 13 18:39:44 raspberrypi reef-pi[14375]: 2019/11/13 18:39:44 lighting-subsystem: Loading profile for channel Blues
Nov 13 18:39:44 raspberrypi reef-pi[14375]: 2019/11/13 18:39:44 ERROR: lighting subsystem. Profile value computation error. Light: RightLEDLight channel: Blues Error: Failed to parse start time. Error:parsing time "08:15" as "15:04:05": c
Nov 13 18:39:44 raspberrypi reef-pi[14375]: 2019/11/13 18:39:44 lighting subsystem: Setting Light: RightLEDLight Channel: Blues Value: 0
Nov 13 18:39:44 raspberrypi reef-pi[14375]: 2019/11/13 18:39:44 lighting-subsystem: Setting PWM value: 0 at channel: 6
Nov 13 18:39:44 raspberrypi reef-pi[14375]: 2019/11/13 18:39:44 onTime 0 offTime 4095

Rolled back to 3.0 alpha and lights restored to the correct values.

I have seen this behavior as well. I run 4 channels of lighting off the pca9685 and half my channels are unusable on 3.0 beta. 3.0 alpha works fine. Thanks for the heads up on the latest 3.0!

 

[Bigtrout]

A lot of the issue may also come from using a switching regulator, as opposed to a linear. Switchers can be noisy, but I can start testing circuits with the scope to see what might be noisy. A weak grounding circuit can also play a lot into that. Tying everything into a single PCB will help with grounding quite a lot, since there is such a robust ground between the Pi itself and any hat boards.

I'll know better in about two weeks. Generating the files now, ordering shortly. I don't think I have enough posts yet to link images. Just shooting for a workable prototype at the moment anyway but I think it's looking clean for a quick night of work.

I have been using meanwell RS series 5v power supplies exclusively one for the pi and one for my relay boards without a hiccup for 8 months now.

I did however have big noise issues with the cheap power bricks supplying my beamswork LED lights. They were very noisy and causing temp probe and ph probe errors. Switching them out with quality power bricks rated at double the current needed fixed the problem.

When choosing a power supply its never a wise idea to run at more than 80 percent of the rated load. 50 percent is even better. When switching power supplies approach 100 percent of rated load weird things happen with voltages, noise, waveforms and frequencies, etc.

The buck convertors used for reef pi, the lm2596 are a good circuit...with one caution!
The cheap boards from.china are very variable. Some come with properly sized and speced components and work fine. Others are copies and the passive components seem to be sized at whatever the factory had a bunch of and are very unreliable. I chose meanwell power supplies because they are at least UL listed and good quality.

As an example of the china electronic board variability, i used mosfet modules to interface my beamswork lights to the pca 9685 pwm. The board I used works great. But if you look on amazon and ebay and the chinese good sites, they all have similar modules but careful looking at the pics of them, half of them use passive components which would not allow you to use a pwm frequency much above 100hz. The ones I got allow me to use up to 1000hz. All this because they used 2
resistors that were not the proper resistance for the circuit design.

 

[hhaase]

That pretty much nails my concern with the LM2596 modules, cheap switching power supplies can have a huge negative effect on a processor system. Particularly ones that are made to such a vague standard with so little documentation. Given how prolific and varied the LM2596's are out there, I'd assume most of the IC's are counterfeit's on them, and god knows what the capacitor tolerances are. Switchers are just too easy to make poorly. I'm not great at designing power supplies, in fact I try to avoid it due to liability risks, but I can spot bad ones pretty easily.

That's really one of the hiccups in open-source systems in general. Once a design hits the Shenzhen / Amazon / Ebay pipeline, you have no idea what you're going to receive. Just look at all the knockoff arduino's, Pi's, and 3D printer controllers out there. Definitely something to consider in this project if it gets enough traction.

 

[Bigtrout]

That pretty much nails my concern with the LM2596 modules, cheap switching power supplies can have a huge negative effect on a processor system. Particularly ones that are made to such a vague standard with so little documentation. Given how prolific and varied the LM2596's are out there, I'd assume most of the IC's are counterfeit's on them, and god knows what the capacitor tolerances are. Switchers are just too easy to make poorly. I'm not great at designing power supplies, in fact I try to avoid it due to liability risks, but I can spot bad ones pretty easily.

That's really one of the hiccups in open-source systems in general. Once a design hits the Shenzhen / Amazon / Ebay pipeline, you have no idea what you're going to receive. Just look at all the knockoff arduino's, Pi's, and 3D printer controllers out there. Definitely something to consider in this project if it gets enough traction.

Exactly my thoughts...I know reef-pi is a open source DIY project but sometimes a few dollars cheaper is not worth it. Especially with power supplies. At least when you get a Meanwell you get a UL listed part and something with well documented performance specifications.

 

[Ranjib]

That pretty much nails my concern with the LM2596 modules, cheap switching power supplies can have a huge negative effect on a processor system. Particularly ones that are made to such a vague standard with so little documentation. Given how prolific and varied the LM2596's are out there, I'd assume most of the IC's are counterfeit's on them, and god knows what the capacitor tolerances are. Switchers are just too easy to make poorly. I'm not great at designing power supplies, in fact I try to avoid it due to liability risks, but I can spot bad ones pretty easily.

That's really one of the hiccups in open-source systems in general. Once a design hits the Shenzhen / Amazon / Ebay pipeline, you have no idea what you're going to receive. Just look at all the knockoff arduino's, Pi's, and 3D printer controllers out there. Definitely something to consider in this project if it gets enough traction.

For the right reason, we can definitely recommend quality parts. In fact raspberry pi and adafruit parts are kinda expensive compared to their alternatives. I agree amazon provides a lot more options, including the bad ones, but its up to us to reduce that set to few proven ones as and when we learn from using them. In general, I think Amazon is much easier and safer place to recommend as you have a single place to get everything, most things can be returned, its not as wild as ebay where you are totally on your own judgment. Like these power supplies, I don't think they are the worst. We are seeing issues with AIO circuits and as we know more about their working state, but for all other things they are working. As in I am using multiple lm2596 converters for over three years across temperature, ato, ph, power controller without any issue.. all of them run pi as well.
If you have any good recommendations, do let us know, happy to include them if they are better, even if its slightly more expensive. Price is not the main benefit for amazon, its easy and relatively better quality controlled and available to much wider audiance. And I am confident that if we come up with very good guides and recommended parts, we can contain the hardware quality issue to a large extent. Its an opensource, hacking friendly system, so folks will definitely hotrod it (and i love that too), in those cases they are on their own..

 

[Bigtrout]

And I am confident that if we come up with very good guides and recommended parts, we can contain the hardware quality issue to a large extent.

This would solve alot of issues that happen...if the hardware is good it makes troubleshooting much easier when someone new decides to build a reef-pi.

 

[Ranjib]

This would solve alot of issues that happen...if the hardware is good it makes troubleshooting much easier when someone new decides to build a reef-pi.

Yes.. And if you think from that perspective, these ds18b20 sensors are probably the most frequently encountered issue, and i am still thinking what we can improve from hardware side to make it more robust

 

[Mike Kearns]

Hive minds,
I have just cut another release candidate, reef-pi 3.0-rc0 . This is the first release candidate for 3.0, coming two weeks after 3.0 beta release. This means we have fixed all the critical bugs. And unless some new blockers found (serious bugs ) we are on our course for final release. This is mostly a bugfix release since 3.0 beta with some ui improvements for the light module. Here is a summary of changes, taken straight from the release page,

• bugfix: reef-pi db command argument processing
• bugfix: jack remove ui was broken
• feat: expose reversible option for macro (required for control target)
• feat: light ui support for 3.0 api
• feat: dutch translation
• bugfix: temperature and ph chart current reading not showing
• chore: log driver initialization errors
• chore: improve internationalization coverage (connectors ui)
• feat: use selectable pins for connectors based on driver types
• bugfix: email to ui field under telemetry section does not accept user input

packages can be found in usual location: https://github.com/reef-pi/reef-pi/releases/tag/3.0.0-rc0

I need help. I am a Raspberry pi/linux nube and don't know how to install the rc0. i successfully used the get command and downloaded it but when I type sudo dpkg -i reef-pi-3.0.0-rc0-pi0.deb it comes back with an error saying its not a debian format archive. Thanks in advance!

 

[Ranjib]

I need help. I am a Raspberry pi/linux nube and don't know how to install the rc0. i successfully used the get command and downloaded it but when I type sudo dpkg -i reef-pi-3.0.0-rc0-pi0.deb it comes back with an error saying its not a debian format archive. Thanks in advance!

pi zero or 3? remove the file and try this (for zero):

wget -c https://github.com/reef-pi/reef-pi/releases/download/3.0.0-rc0/reef-pi-3.0.0-rc0-pi0.deb
sudo dpkg -i reef-pi-3.0.0-rc0-pi0.deb

 

[Des Westcott]

I'm still having strange Adafruit feed / Temperature probe issues, and I wonder if they could be related.

I have 3 feeds showing up on AIO (System Load, System Memory and Cabinet Temp. These seem to be working as expected. Additional feeds show in AIO, but do not update.

Then my "Cabinet Temp" and "Electronics Box Temp" are both set to take readings every 60 seconds, but produce very different graphs. I'm wondering why this is. They are both taking temperatures in air.

Finally, I have been wondering why Reef-Pi seems to always display a different time to my system time and if this could be related to the AIO feeds. Sometimes they are the same, then Reef-Pi seems to stay the same while time marches on in the real world.

 

[hhaase]

I'm not a fan of optical style level sensors like the DS18B20. They're very useful for a fluid alarm, detecting fluids that shouldn't be there. Not so great for detecting dry situations. Too often that excess humidity keeps them wet, or crust builds up on them, and stuff like that.

Float switches are usually super-easy to deal with, as long as you aren't dealing with things that get foamy. But of course aren't easy to move/adjust once they're installed.

Lots of other options out there, but they get real expensive real quick when you start looking at capacitance, ultrasonic, or proximity type sensoring.

 

[Bigtrout]

I'm not a fan of optical style level sensors like the DS18B20. They're very useful for a fluid alarm, detecting fluids that shouldn't be there. Not so great for detecting dry situations. Too often that excess humidity keeps them wet, or crust builds up on them, and stuff like that.

Float switches are usually super-easy to deal with, as long as you aren't dealing with things that get foamy. But of course aren't easy to move/adjust once they're installed.

Lots of other options out there, but they get real expensive real quick when you start looking at capacitance, ultrasonic, or proximity type sensoring.

I work with alot of industrial controls and float switches are used 90 percent of the time because they are simple and reliable. The 10 percent of cases where they use something else is because its a special use case.

 

[Bigtrout]

I'm still having strange Adafruit feed / Temperature probe issues, and I wonder if they could be related.

I have 3 feeds showing up on AIO (System Load, System Memory and Cabinet Temp. These seem to be working as expected. Additional feeds show in AIO, but do not update.

Then my "Cabinet Temp" and "Electronics Box Temp" are both set to take readings every 60 seconds, but produce very different graphs. I'm wondering why this is. They are both taking temperatures in air.

Finally, I have been wondering why Reef-Pi seems to always display a different time to my system time and if this could be related to the AIO feeds. Sometimes they are the same, then Reef-Pi seems to stay the same while time marches on in the real world.

See my build thread about adding a real time clock on the i2c bus. I get alot of power and internet blinks and the RTC keeps the system time where ita suppoaed to be. Otherwise raspian gets its time from the internet. Strange things happen in linux based systems if file time stamps get messed up.
The adafruit feeds are time stamped as well. Dont know what happens if they get messed up but that could be your problem.

The 2 temp graphs you showed could be normal...the temp in the box may stay steadier than your cabinet temp. I have 2 tank sensors and one for ambient air. The tank sensors are a very steady graph. My ambient air sensor picks up when the forced hot air furnace kicks on and off so its a jagged graph like the one you have on the left.

 

[Des Westcott]

See my build thread about adding a real time clock on the i2c bus. I get alot of power and internet blinks and the RTC keeps the system time where ita suppoaed to be. Otherwise raspian gets its time from the internet. Strange things happen in linux based systems if file time stamps get messed up.
The adafruit feeds are time stamped as well. Dont know what happens if they get messed up but that could be your problem.

The 2 temp graphs you showed could be normal...the temp in the box may stay steadier than your cabinet temp. I have 2 tank sensors and one for ambient air. The tank sensors are a very steady graph. My ambient air sensor picks up when the forced hot air furnace kicks on and off so its a jagged graph like the one you have on the left.

Cool

I found your thread and have found your post where you detail the install. I just don't see how you connected the DS3231 to the Hat. Help please?

I'm picking one up tomorrow, so will hopefully install over the weekend.

 

[Bigtrout]

Cool

I found your thread and have found your post where you detail the install. I just don't see how you connected the DS3231 to the Hat. Help please?

I'm picking one up tomorrow, so will hopefully install over the weekend.

Are u using a mike lane hat? If so the ph1 and ph2 connectors could also be labeled i2c connectors...use one of those...the ds3231 board even has a feed thru so u dont lose the space

 

[Des Westcott]

Are u using a mike lane hat? If so the ph1 and ph2 connectors could also be labeled i2c connectors...use one of those...the ds3231 board even has a feed thru so u dont lose the space

Yes the Michael Lane Hat. OK. I'll use one of the PH ports.

"the ds3231 board even has a feed thru so u dont lose the space" *sigh* I wish I knew what that actually meant. I think it means that I could still plug a PH into the "out" pins on the DS3231 board, but I wouldn't try it without checking with someone first!

 

[Bigtrout]

Yes the Michael Lane Hat. OK. I'll use one of the PH ports.

"the ds3231 board even has a feed thru so u dont lose the space" *sigh* I wish I knew what that actually meant. I think it means that I could still plug a PH into the "out" pins on the DS3231 board, but I wouldn't try it without checking with someone first!

Sorry, thats exactly what it means. Theres an in and an out port so you can plug a ph board into the ds3231. In fact thats what I did in my build so it works and is ok.

The i2c bus is an addressable communication bus. You can daisy chain many devices thru one connector.

 

[Des Westcott]

Can anyone help me figure out why I'm getting these "invalid URL" messages? I'm still getting hardly any info through on AIO. Just the system stats and one of the temp probes.