wolf.arthur
New Member
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2026
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- What state or country do you live in
- Maine
Hey.
TL;DR, looking to know what the state of the art / beginner recommendation is in terms of control system / hardware / firmware on the electronics side.
I've been learning a bit about all this, and I see several mentions of "SeaDragon"...
Is that project still going, I went to the github to try to learn more about it but it's giving me a 404... Same for the Youtube and the Reddit...
Ok also, I'm the guy behind the smoothieboard, it's a controller for CNC machines, our firmware is in hundreds of thousands of machines around the world.
I had an email recently from a guy who bought several smoothieboards for his cnc mill, laser etc, and ended up with a couple extra boards, and was saying a lot of what's on there could work as a reef project controller (for context, I had zero idea this was even a thing until a couple hours ago): stepper controller for dosing pumps, mosfets, etc.
He's very passionate about all the reef/hydroponic stuff, so I asked him to give me a primer, but his English isn't the best, so I'm sort of trying to figure this out.
In parralel to all that, we've been working on finding new software to run on our boards, to extend the user base, like have our own firmware for people who do CNC (3D printing, lasers, etc), but we are currently porting microROS (so people can use it in robots), and openPLC (for logic controllers, like industrial hardware), etc.
And this got me thinking if maybe there was some kind of standard "reef" firmware/software that it would make sense to port to our hardware, so people would maybe use our board as the basis for their reef projects?
To give a bit more info on smoothie, it comes in two main flavors (I'll concentrate on the v2), v2-prime, which has a whole bunch of hardware on board you'd need to control a 3D printer or CNC mill (or syringe pumps, we actually helped hospitals during the height of covid use it to control syringe pumps when they ran out of the expensive real thing), and v2-core, which has only raw i/o, and is meant to be used with extension boards.
The extension boards are actually an important part of the project on the hardware side, we've designed the board to be very extensible, they have 7 "gadgeteer" ports, and we've created a large set of extension boards that are compatible with that port (on top of those already existing on the market), we have nearly 20 already designed, and 50 more undergoing design or testing, almost anything you can think of, we'll have an extension board for. I think this sort of "modular" setup would work well for hydroponics/similar projects where everybody's setup is different.
Anyway, my main questions are:
1. What do people use, is there some kind of standard.
2. Anything people commonly complain about/is missing that it would make sense to work on bringing to the table
3. Maybe a bit more of a general intro to the subject, I'll do some research myself now, but any info would be helpful.
Cheers.
TL;DR, looking to know what the state of the art / beginner recommendation is in terms of control system / hardware / firmware on the electronics side.
I've been learning a bit about all this, and I see several mentions of "SeaDragon"...
Is that project still going, I went to the github to try to learn more about it but it's giving me a 404... Same for the Youtube and the Reddit...
Ok also, I'm the guy behind the smoothieboard, it's a controller for CNC machines, our firmware is in hundreds of thousands of machines around the world.
I had an email recently from a guy who bought several smoothieboards for his cnc mill, laser etc, and ended up with a couple extra boards, and was saying a lot of what's on there could work as a reef project controller (for context, I had zero idea this was even a thing until a couple hours ago): stepper controller for dosing pumps, mosfets, etc.
He's very passionate about all the reef/hydroponic stuff, so I asked him to give me a primer, but his English isn't the best, so I'm sort of trying to figure this out.
In parralel to all that, we've been working on finding new software to run on our boards, to extend the user base, like have our own firmware for people who do CNC (3D printing, lasers, etc), but we are currently porting microROS (so people can use it in robots), and openPLC (for logic controllers, like industrial hardware), etc.
And this got me thinking if maybe there was some kind of standard "reef" firmware/software that it would make sense to port to our hardware, so people would maybe use our board as the basis for their reef projects?
To give a bit more info on smoothie, it comes in two main flavors (I'll concentrate on the v2), v2-prime, which has a whole bunch of hardware on board you'd need to control a 3D printer or CNC mill (or syringe pumps, we actually helped hospitals during the height of covid use it to control syringe pumps when they ran out of the expensive real thing), and v2-core, which has only raw i/o, and is meant to be used with extension boards.
The extension boards are actually an important part of the project on the hardware side, we've designed the board to be very extensible, they have 7 "gadgeteer" ports, and we've created a large set of extension boards that are compatible with that port (on top of those already existing on the market), we have nearly 20 already designed, and 50 more undergoing design or testing, almost anything you can think of, we'll have an extension board for. I think this sort of "modular" setup would work well for hydroponics/similar projects where everybody's setup is different.
Anyway, my main questions are:
1. What do people use, is there some kind of standard.
2. Anything people commonly complain about/is missing that it would make sense to work on bringing to the table
3. Maybe a bit more of a general intro to the subject, I'll do some research myself now, but any info would be helpful.
Cheers.
