Reef-pi on Nano (Fluval Evo XII)

[julioabreu01]

Hey Guys,

I'm new to the forum and a "legacy" hobbyist. I shut down my last saltwater aquarium more than 10 years ago in Brazil. But now that I'm leaving in US and with all the pandemic-stress I decided to go back to the Reef world with a nano. I started a Fluval Evo XII with standard configuration about a month ago. Its doing pretty well and I already have two little ocellaris as well as some soft corals.
But as my other hobby is DIY and I'm a IT professional I decided to just blend everything together and bring some automation to the reef!

So, Im leveraging the awesome Open source Reef-Pi by @Ranjib and will be posting the advance of the build here to share and mainly to get your feedbacks and inputs.

Material so far:

Main Controller and Sensors:

Raspberry PI 4B 2GB RAM (you can use other versions, I just went with the latest one... you know, Im an IT Nerd ) - 35.00 USD from Adafruit https://www.adafruit.com/product/4292

Protoboard and Jumper wires - Less than 10.00 USD on Ebay

Temperature Sensor Kit - 8.99 on Amazon - Strongly recommend this one as it comes with the required resistor so you dont need to solder anything (I hate soldering).

Liquid Level Sensor - 7.99 on Amazon

2x Cat-5 Connector - 4.5 USD on HomeDepot - To build the connection between main board and power box

Power Box

4 Ch 5V Relay board - 5.95 on Ebay - I decided to go with just 4 channel power box as it will be enough for the equipment I have on my Nano.

3 Gang Plastic Eletrical Box - about 5.00 on Homedepot - Space for 2 dual outlets and a 3rd slot to accommodate the relay board as well as connections

2x Dual Outlets - About 1.50 on HomeDepot

Cheap Power Strip - Less than 5.00 USD or you can salvage from your garage - To steal the inlet cable and power switch

Wallplates, Electrical connectors - About 10,00 on HomeDepot


And here is how I'm doing so far:


Temperature sensor:

Preparing the Power Box connection:







Preparing the Power Box:













Placing the Level Sensor (ATO):




Everything working nice and smooth (I know, I miss the Pi housing too ):







Hope you guys like it! Please share your feedbacks or questions! -

 

[Specific Ocean]

Welcome! Neat build!

 

[julioabreu01]

Welcome! Neat build!

Thank You! I need to make a housing for the controller but I'm pretty satisfied so far....
As soon I have some time I will start digging into the code to try to connect to a more robust dashboard service like freeboard.io or something similar so I can monitor it from outside my network (I know I can do it with Adafruit.io but dont like too much the look and feel).

Regards!

 

[StlSalt]

This is awesome. I'm slowly working on my reef-pi build and have the temp probe working and waiting on parts to get a PH probe running. I love your power boxes can you post a some more information or pictures on your connection from the Pi GPIO to the RJ45 connector? I'd like to see how they map out. Thanks.

 

[julioabreu01]

This is awesome. I'm slowly working on my reef-pi build and have the temp probe working and waiting on parts to get a PH probe running. I love your power boxes can you post a some more information or pictures on your connection from the Pi GPIO to the RJ45 connector? I'd like to see how they map out. Thanks.

Hi, Thanks for the comments!

I made straight connections between the GPIOs and the RJ-45, no special order. The only thing you have to take into considerations is that anything you enter in connector 1 in one side will be out in connector 1 in the other side.
So, just for my own organization I connected all the Data pins in one side (1-4) and the ground and V in the other side (7-8).
One important on the bridge cable (network patch) - Use straight cables and NOT crossover cables, otherwise you will scramble the connections.

 

[StlSalt]

Hi, Thanks for the comments!

I made straight connections between the GPIOs and the RJ-45, no special order. The only thing you have to take into considerations is that anything you enter in connector 1 in one side will be out in connector 1 in the other side.
So, just for my own organization I connected all the Data pins in one side (1-4) and the ground and V in the other side (7-8).
One important on the bridge cable (network patch) - Use straight cables and NOT crossover cables, otherwise you will scramble the connections.

That makes a lot of sense now. So you use one pair for power to the controller board and another 2 pairs for the on/off data to each socket. Is that right?

 

[julioabreu01]

That makes a lot of sense now. So you use one pair for power to the controller board and another 2 pairs for the on/off data to each socket. Is that right?

Yes, Exactly. To connect the RJ45 female sockets to the board I just used jumper cables, cutting one side to crimp into the socket and connecting the other side directly in the GPIO (PI and Relay board) .

 

[Ranjib]

Welcome to r2r. Your build looks awesome. Off to a great start.
Thank you so much for the kind words. It means a lot for us the reef-pi community. We all learn a bit from individual build threads.

Regarding the dashboard integration. reef-pi ships with prometheus integration, if you are ok with non-cloud data storage, prometheus+grafana will beat anything out there by a large margin, as long as charting/alerting capabilities are concerned. The adafruit.io integration is somewhat similar to what you mentioned, worth exploring.
Inside the code base, reef-pi has a dedicated telemetry sub-system for metric emission, that interface can be used to integrate new drivers.

 

[fade2black]

Looks good! Definitely on my to-do list this year.