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

drm2215

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I have a Kessil A160WE and it will be the only light for my Fluval Evo 13.5. I read that if you only need two channels of lighting control you can use the GPIO 18 & 19 as lighting channels, does anyone have a wiring diagram/build thread on doing this specifically?
 

Martin Lowry

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Anyone had any experience hooking up Current Orbit Marine Pro light fixtures to Reef-Pi? I have two of them and was hoping to get them hooked up to my Reef-Pi at some point. The lights come with a programmable timer that allows LED intensity/brightness and various other settings so I'm assuming they are PWM driven.
 

Mikeneedsahobby

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I have a Kessil A160WE and it will be the only light for my Fluval Evo 13.5. I read that if you only need two channels of lighting control you can use the GPIO 18 & 19 as lighting channels, does anyone have a wiring diagram/build thread on doing this specifically?
I don’t have kessil myself, so I’m not sure what they need for an input. The module build from @Ranjib is for a kessil though.
“For one part of the build, we'll extend our previous reef-pi build to control Kessil lights (A360, A80 or A160), Kessil allows controlling the spectrum and intensity of the light using 10V pulse width modulation (PWM).”
So from his guide he is using 10v pwm signals. I would follow his guide from there.

Gpio are just on and off signals. They can be inputs or outputs. This would only be good for turning the lights on and off, but not for intensity. Pwm is for programming intensity changes. The pi has 2 3.3v pwm signals. You can get 16 more with a pca9685 chip. Then ranjib used an npn transistor to convert the 3.3v pwm to 10v pwm.
 

Mikeneedsahobby

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Anyone had any experience hooking up Current Orbit Marine Pro light fixtures to Reef-Pi? I have two of them and was hoping to get them hooked up to my Reef-Pi at some point. The lights come with a programmable timer that allows LED intensity/brightness and various other settings so I'm assuming they are PWM driven.
I personally haven’t seen anyone do that yet. I have an orbit marine fixture but it’s gathering dust now. The controller that came with it quit. These lights have individually addressed leds. The feed to the lights is 3 channel and the current flows through. Gnd, power, signal? So does that mean the signal is digital to control the many channels? You might need to open up the lights and share pictures of the circuit to get help from people smarter than me.
 
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Martin Lowry

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I personally haven’t seen anyone do that yet. I have an orbit marine fixture but it’s gathering dust now. The controller that came with it quit. The feed to the lights is 3 channel and the current flows through. Gnd, power, signal? So does that mean the signal is digital to control two channels. Or is it gnd, pwm power, pwm power to control 2 channels? You might need to open up the lights and share pictures of the circuit to get help from people smarter than me.
Yeah! My controller quit as well, luckily it was still in warranty so Current USA replaced it. It just occurred to me that I have the old one. I pulled it apart and it looks like there's C1, C2, V, and GD connections on the PCB. I have the two light setup so I guess it's C1, C2 V, Gnd going to each light. I think those 78M06's may be MOSFET's. Maybe there are some "Smarter than me" people out there who know more.....
ramp timer.jpg
 

drm2215

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I don’t have kessil myself, so I’m not sure what they need for an input. The module build from @Ranjib is for a kessil though.
“For one part of the build, we'll extend our previous reef-pi build to control Kessil lights (A360, A80 or A160), Kessil allows controlling the spectrum and intensity of the light using 10V pulse width modulation (PWM).”
So from his guide he is using 10v pwm signals. I would follow his guide from there.

Gpio are just on and off signals. They can be inputs or outputs. This would only be good for turning the lights on and off, but not for intensity. Pwm is for programming intensity changes. The pi has 2 3.3v pwm signals. You can get 16 more with a pca9685 chip. Then ranjib used an npn transistor to convert the 3.3v pwm to 10v pwm.
ok that makes sense. Do you know of a build thread that has used the 2 onboard pwm channels to control a single Kessil A160WE? The guide you quoted is awesome but it for 7 channels of lighting and I really only need 2 so the onboard channels are perfect and saves me the trouble of adding the PCA9685 chip. I'm hoping it simplifies the process significantly. Thanks for your help.
 

NeonRabbit221B

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So I was moving apartments when I stumbled upon an old project I did several years ago called MagicMirror which essentially uses a screen behind a 1-way mirror/reflective plastic. After updating a module it broke so it kinda just sat in the corner but I am interested in restarting the project as a display for my reef-pi data. I have limited to no experience with the development side of using APIs but I can learn fairly quickly when it comes to programming. Before I get ahead of myself I was wondering if any of you brilliant developers/coders can answer a surface level question. Is this feasible for a newbie? Is the communication protocol fairly straight forward between reef-pi and MM? Here is the github link for the MM project. It has grown quite a bit over the last 3 years and definitely worth checking out if you have an unused monitor and some DIY ingenuity.

 

Mikeneedsahobby

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ok that makes sense. Do you know of a build thread that has used the 2 onboard pwm channels to control a single Kessil A160WE? The guide you quoted is awesome but it for 7 channels of lighting and I really only need 2 so the onboard channels are perfect and saves me the trouble of adding the PCA9685 chip. I'm hoping it simplifies the process significantly. Thanks for your help.
Yes you should be able to use the pi pwm to the npn transistors and not install the pca9685.
 

Mikeneedsahobby

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Yeah! My controller quit as well, luckily it was still in warranty so Current USA replaced it. It just occurred to me that I have the old one. I pulled it apart and it looks like there's C1, C2, V, and GD connections on the PCB. I have the two light setup so I guess it's C1, C2 V, Gnd going to each light. I think those 78M06's may be MOSFET's. Maybe there are some "Smarter than me" people out there who know more.....
ramp timer.jpg
I googled 78m06 and it appears to be a voltage regulator. The rest is to electrical for me to understand. I would love for you to solve it though so I can copy.
 

Mikeneedsahobby

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So I was moving apartments when I stumbled upon an old project I did several years ago called MagicMirror which essentially uses a screen behind a 1-way mirror/reflective plastic. After updating a module it broke so it kinda just sat in the corner but I am interested in restarting the project as a display for my reef-pi data. I have limited to no experience with the development side of using APIs but I can learn fairly quickly when it comes to programming. Before I get ahead of myself I was wondering if any of you brilliant developers/coders can answer a surface level question. Is this feasible for a newbie? Is the communication protocol fairly straight forward between reef-pi and MM? Here is the github link for the MM project. It has grown quite a bit over the last 3 years and definitely worth checking out if you have an unused monitor and some DIY ingenuity.

Reef pi displays through a web page. If you have an internet browser on MM and WiFi connection you should be able to display reef pi from your Lan.
If you are talking about capturing and displaying data from reef pi but not the reef pi web page then most people are using Prometheus. Reef pi will send data to Prometheus for storage and for custom graphs. You can display this on a webpage from the web.
 

NeonRabbit221B

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Reef pi displays through a web page. If you have an internet browser on MM and WiFi connection you should be able to display reef pi from your Lan.
If you are talking about capturing and displaying data from reef pi but not the reef pi web page then most people are using Prometheus. Reef pi will send data to Prometheus for storage and for custom graphs. You can display this on a webpage from the web.
Thank you! My original thought was just to have a quick glance of tank temperatures, ph, ect that pops up as I approach the mirror. I think it would be much easier going the prometheus route and use an existing module iFrame is display the webpage. I appreciate the reply!
 

Mikeneedsahobby

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Thank you! My original thought was just to have a quick glance of tank temperatures, ph, ect that pops up as I approach the mirror. I think it would be much easier going the prometheus route and use an existing module iFrame is display the webpage. I appreciate the reply!
Yes. Is mm touch screen? If it is then displaying reef pi would be better so you can make changes.
 

NeonRabbit221B

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Yes. Is mm touch screen? If it is then displaying reef pi would be better so you can make changes.
It depends on the monitor you use and thickness of the plastic but I don't hear many positive things about making it touch enabled. I was just going to use it to display a snap shot of each tank (along with weather, commute time ect) and sprint to my laptop if something looked off.
 

ekopapers

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Hey guys thanks for all your work on this, I just set my reef up and I am using the michael lane goby hat as well as the viparspectra adapters that he makes, so everything was pretty plug and play. What I am struggling to figure out is how I actually set the lights up in the reef pi software. any help would be appreciated!
 

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Hey guys thanks for all your work on this, I just set my reef up and I am using the michael lane goby hat as well as the viparspectra adapters that he makes, so everything was pretty plug and play. What I am struggling to figure out is how I actually set the lights up in the reef pi software. any help would be appreciated!

Are you using a phone or a computer?

I couldn't set mine up on a phone at all, but it was a doddle on a computer, once set up you can edit on a phone.
 

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ok that makes sense. Do you know of a build thread that has used the 2 onboard pwm channels to control a single Kessil A160WE? The guide you quoted is awesome but it for 7 channels of lighting and I really only need 2 so the onboard channels are perfect and saves me the trouble of adding the PCA9685 chip. I'm hoping it simplifies the process significantly. Thanks for your help.

If you follow the guide just pretend that the PCA9685 board is your Pi, everything else should be the same just for two channels instead of seven in total. The Pi has its two PWM channels available on four pins where pin 12/13 are for channel PWM 0 and 13/19 is for channel PWM 1.
 

Martin Lowry

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I googled 78m06 and it appears to be a voltage regulator. The rest is to electrical for me to understand. I would love for you to solve it though so I can copy.
After further investigation and downloading a magnifying glass app I managed to get a look at the MCU and it's a HOLTEK HT67F50. I Googled the data sheet it has a PWM output so I'm guessing that these lights may work with Reef-Pi. Now I have to figure out Voltage and current is required for each strip. They each have 60 LED's and require 36w. Next step is to meter the outputs on the programmer.
 

drm2215

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If you follow the guide just pretend that the PCA9685 board is your Pi, everything else should be the same just for two channels instead of seven in total. The Pi has its two PWM channels available on four pins where pin 12/13 are for channel PWM 0 and 13/19 is for channel PWM 1.
Thank you for this. My one concern is that I am already using pin 12 for the power control circuit?
 

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If you follow the guide just pretend that the PCA9685 board is your Pi, everything else should be the same just for two channels instead of seven in total. The Pi has its two PWM channels available on four pins where pin 12/13 are for channel PWM 0 and 13/19 is for channel PWM 1.

EDIT to above post: should be pin 12/18 for PWM 0.
 
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