Reef Pi Build

[Ranjib]

Got some more stuff!!
This is what I have so far for my dosing pump build I will be working on the circuits tonight and should have the raspberry pi and proto hat tomorrow.

L293 chip https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BADVVF8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
2 Peristaltic pumps https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0791YL351/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Buck converter https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XRN7NFQ/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Raspberry pi 3 https://www.arrow.com/en/products/raspberrypi3/raspberry-pi-foundation
16gb sd card with noobs https://www.arrow.com/en/products/noobs-16gb-retail/raspberry-pi-foundation
Perma proto pi hat https://www.arrow.com/en/products/2310/adafruit-industries

I'm going to wait for a bit on the ph probe and hardware for that to see what progress @Ranjib makes on supporting @Roberto_b ph probe board. https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/reef-pi-ph-orp-adapter.478158/

Exciting , keep us posted. Do you have access to some type of measuring cylinder or cup? I use these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01ECAQPWA/ , to calibrate / understand how much it doses for given pwm speed in given time period.

 

[Diamond1]

Exciting , keep us posted. Do you have access to some type of measuring cylinder or cup? I use these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01ECAQPWA/ , to calibrate / understand how much it doses for given pwm speed in given time period.

Those are fancy. I just might have to get some of those.

 

[Fishyj]

Just placed my order for some parts. Excited to get started with this thanks to you and @Ranjib and others. Not too worried about the building part of it, just the programming end. While waiting for parts its time to read through all the posts.

 

[Ranjib]

Just placed my order for some parts. Excited to get started with this thanks to you and @Ranjib and others. Not too worried about the building part of it, just the programming end. While waiting for parts its time to read through all the posts.

Dont worry, we are all here for you, and this does not require a any programming, may be little bit of tinkering with computers at best

 

[Diamond1]

Just placed my order for some parts. Excited to get started with this thanks to you and @Ranjib and others. Not too worried about the building part of it, just the programming end. While waiting for parts its time to read through all the posts.

That is so cool. It's very exciting starting a build. And like Ranjid said there is a lot of people doing this and they are very helpful.

I was leary of the whole process when I started but now that I'm doing it I have been very happy with the results and it's been a lot of fun.

 

[Diamond1]

Got back into hardware mode tonight. I got my new pi3 set up with reef-pie 2.0 rc3 and started working on the circuit construction for the proto pi hat.
I kind of deviated from the fritzing diagram a bit. but the circuit is the same. I also only have 5 colors of 22AWG so some of the wire colors are different.
The way I have it there was about 15 less solder joints than if I had followed the fritzing. By using longer wire runs instead of the rails I was able to cut the build time down also.

I will be powering the second pi off the 12 volt power rails on the main pi3. I'll run the power to a 12v rail on the second pi3 and then to the buck converter for 5v power and the 12v will power the dosing motors.
It's my understanding that the 12v 2 amp power supply has more than enough power to run both modules.
The way I wired up the proto hat using 22AWG solid core wire, the proto hat can handle up to 7amps, so if I need to increase my power supply from 2 amps to 4 it shouldn't be a problem.

With the circuit layout I have I should have enough room and GPIO pins to attach the ph module and a new temp probe via breakout boards.

 

[crusso1993]

Well, all of my plans of setting up 300g system went up in smoke last week. The motor in my wife's car decided it was time to blow up (just outside of warranty). So, all the cash I had put aside for jumping back into this hobby will pretty much be chewed up. Such a huge disappointment. Nevertheless, I've still been following along with your build and am excited at the possibilities of what will be available by the time I'm ready to jump in again. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Diamond1]

Well, all of my plans of setting up 300g system went up in smoke last week. The motor in my wife's car decided it was time to blow up (just outside of warranty). So, all the cash I had put aside for jumping back into this hobby will pretty much be chewed up. Such a huge disappointment. Nevertheless, I've still been following along with your build and am excited at the possibilities of what will be available by the time I'm ready to jump in again. Thanks for sharing!

Sorry to hear that. I know all about life getting in the way of a big tank. I have been wanting to do a 120 gallon for a long time and have settled for smaller tanks for the last 5 years.

 

[crusso1993]

Sorry to hear that. I know all about life getting in the way of a big tank. I have been wanting to do a 120 gallon for a long time and have settled for smaller tanks for the last 5 years.

I was going to "like" your post but thought liking it to be inappropriate since it is a situation that sucks! I'll give some thought to a smaller setup. Maybe a 40 breeder for now.

 

[Diamond1]

I was going to "like" your post but thought liking it to be inappropriate since it is a situation that sucks! I'll give some thought to a smaller setup. Maybe a 40 breeder for now.

I look at it more like a pat on the back I feel you brother...

 

[Diamond1]

@Ranjib I'm having a bit of an issue with my temp probe. When I first built my proto hat I think I shorted out the circuit that goes to GPIO 4. Some solder crossed a rail and I can't get it off so I think it's a lost cause. I checked my 1/8" socket and the ring for the data part of it is grounding out (cheapo socket I think).
My solution was to make the circuit on a breakout board that's hard wired to the probe.

My question is can I hook the circuit up to an open GPIO like GPIO 21 and will reef-pi recognize the probe or do I have to declare the GPIO in reef-pi?

Here's some pictures of what the circuit will look like when it's done if it works this way (nothing is soldered yet).

 

[Ranjib]

@Ranjib I'm having a bit of an issue with my temp probe. When I first built my proto hat I think I shorted out the circuit that goes to GPIO 4. Some solder crossed a rail and I can't get it off so I think it's a lost cause. I checked my 1/8" socket and the ring for the data part of it is grounding out (cheapo socket I think).
My solution was to make the circuit on a breakout board that's hard wired to the probe.

My question is can I hook the circuit up to an open GPIO like GPIO 21 and will reef-pi recognize the probe or do I have to declare the GPIO in reef-pi?

Here's some pictures of what the circuit will look like when it's done if it works this way (nothing is soldered yet).

GPIO4 is a special GPIO for one wire bus. One wire is the thing that DS18b20 uses to communicate with Pi. This "special" is nothing but a linux kernel configuration, and can be configured easily. https://pinout.xyz/pinout/1_wire
I have not tested this, but if this does not work, I'll test it out on my end.

 

[Diamond1]

GPIO4 is a special GPIO for one wire bus. One wire is the thing that DS18b20 uses to communicate with Pi. This "special" is nothing but a linux kernel configuration, and can be configured easily. https://pinout.xyz/pinout/1_wire
I have not tested this, but if this does not work, I'll test it out on my end.

@Ranjib
I haven't tried this yet but I may have to. I got everything hooked up to gpio 4 and still reef-pi isn't showing me a probe in the drop down menu of the temperature tab. I'm kinda at a loss as to what the problem is. I've checked the circuit with a multi meter and everything checks out. I checked and 1 wire is turned on. I took the 1/8" plug and 1/8" jack out and wired the probe directly to the circuit and still nothing. The only other thing I can think of is maybe a bad probe?

A couple of other things. When I'm setting up the dosing pumps in the configuration/connectors tab, since I'm not using a PCA9685 breakout board, I need to enable the pwm from the rpi?
What gpio pins do I declare?
The pins I have wired into the circuit are 17, 18, 27, mosi, ce0 and 19 per the fritzing diagram. Do I declare all of them?

 

[Diamond1]

I got a lot of work done on getting things loaded into the head unit. I finished up the circuit for the dosing pumps made a new circuit for a temperature probe to connect to the power module. I also got a cable for hooking up the dosing pumps that will be mounted under the tank.

A few issues to figure out with the new rpi. It won't let me connect via VNC. It's saying it's behind a firewall and can't access the port so I need to reconfigure my wireless router to forward the correct port.

 

[Ranjib]

@Ranjib
I haven't tried this yet but I may have to. I got everything hooked up to gpio 4 and still reef-pi isn't showing me a probe in the drop down menu of the temperature tab. I'm kinda at a loss as to what the problem is. I've checked the circuit with a multi meter and everything checks out. I checked and 1 wire is turned on. I took the 1/8" plug and 1/8" jack out and wired the probe directly to the circuit and still nothing. The only other thing I can think of is maybe a bad probe?

A couple of other things. When I'm setting up the dosing pumps in the configuration/connectors tab, since I'm not using a PCA9685 breakout board, I need to enable the pwm from the rpi?
What gpio pins do I declare?
The pins I have wired into the circuit are 17, 18, 27, mosi, ce0 and 19 per the fritzing diagram. Do I declare all of them?

Yes you need rpi PWM. GPIO 18 and 19 will be the PWM pins, in reef-pi you declare them as rpi driver, and pin 0 (for GPIO 18) and pin 1 (for GPIO 19).
The undetected probe is a very common problem for DS18b20 sensors, but I have almost always able to get them working with few checks.
Can you check in termnial if one wire bus is open and no sensor is present, whats the output of following command:

ls /sys/bus/w1/devices/

Sometime the sensors go bad (I have had two, among 9 of the total sensors I have used in past three years). Sometime you have to use a 5V pull up instead of 3.3V. I am assuming you are using 4.7K pull up resistor?

 

[Ranjib]

I got a lot of work done on getting things loaded into the head unit. I finished up the circuit for the dosing pumps made a new circuit for a temperature probe to connect to the power module. I also got a cable for hooking up the dosing pumps that will be mounted under the tank.

A few issues to figure out with the new rpi. It won't let me connect via VNC. It's saying it's behind a firewall and can't access the port so I need to reconfigure my wireless router to forward the correct port.

Looking nice
Temp probe is not working for both the Pi's ? Do you have any extra ds18b20 ? They are like 5 for 12$,

 

[Diamond1]

Yes you need rpi PWM. GPIO 18 and 19 will be the PWM pins, in reef-pi you declare them as rpi driver, and pin 0 (for GPIO 18) and pin 1 (for GPIO 19).
The undetected probe is a very common problem for DS18b20 sensors, but I have almost always able to get them working with few checks.
Can you check in termnial if one wire bus is open and no sensor is present, whats the output of following command:

ls /sys/bus/w1/devices/

Sometime the sensors go bad (I have had two, among 9 of the total sensors I have used in past three years). Sometime you have to use a 5V pull up instead of 3.3V. I am assuming you are using 4.7K pull up resistor?

I bought only 1 sensor from Adafruit that came with the 4.7k resistor. I didn't see the need for a lot of 5 when I bought it. I will probable order a lot of 5 today.
I haven't tried the sensor on the second rpi but may also try that today.

Here's a screen shot of the terminal

 

[Ranjib]

I bought only 1 sensor from Adafruit that came with the 4.7k resistor. I didn't see the need for a lot of 5 when I bought it. I will probable order a lot of 5 today.
I haven't tried the sensor on the second rpi but may also try that today.

Here's a screen shot of the terminal

yeah, the sensor is not detected properly, if its detected properly, you'll see a file with name 28-xxxxxxx instead of that 00-800000 entry, try powering down reef-pi, unplug the sensor and then power back again. sometime just touching the probe fixes it

 

[Diamond1]

yeah, the sensor is not detected properly, if its detected properly, you'll see a file with name 28-xxxxxxx instead of that 00-800000 entry, try powering down reef-pi, unplug the sensor and then power back again. sometime just touching the probe fixes it

I'm pretty sure the sensor is bad. I tried it on the second pi with the same results so I'll order some today and see what happens with a new sensor.

 

[Diamond1]

@Ranjib Ok so I got some issues figured out with my second rpi. I went to set up the dosing pumps and couldn't log in remotely through VNC so I hooked it up to the tv for a monitor and found that the resolution had change to the point that it rendered doing anything on the rpi useless. I ended up having to reload the operating system and reef-pi just to get it working again. A happy side effect of that was there was no longer an issue with my router not letting me remote into reef pi from my desktop.

So I trying to get the dosing pumps working and needed some clarification from you. Is this the way I need to set them up in the connectors tab and dosing tab?