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

[DirtDiggler2823]

Craigslist actually. There is a company nearby that sells drums and container used for food goods transport. http://www.sccfl.com/container-prices.html

Nice!

 

[ScottBrew]

Nice!

Check your local area for a similar company, shipping would be cost prohibitive.

 

[Ranjib]

How did you plumb this to the pump?

I use a dc 12v pump and drop it inside , I don’t do any plumbing

 

[Ranjib]

What do you me by transient? Like transient voltage? I'm not sure what would cause this its seems to happen in the middle of the night this is the second time it happened this time I had to reset it twice I also unplugged my Air temp and Sump temp I only run off the DT temp. The weird thing is that the sump temp notification it disabled but I was still getting text for it also? I think I'm going to try and build a new power supply right now I have a 12v that powers my relays and a 5v for the pi I just picked up a 10a 12v and some voltage regulators to rework my power supply set up. Thanks

By transient I mean the alert automatically goes away after some time

 

[IlliniCoastie]

Do any of you guys use Flow Sensors? I know DIGITEN makes flow sensors in various sizes. They are hall effect sensors. I am just throwing this out there because if your intake gets blocked, one could setup their return pump on a relay that will trip if flow gets cut off as a safety feature.

 

[DirtDiggler2823]

I use a dc 12v pump and drop it inside , I don’t do any plumbing

Just run a hose from the pump into the sump? If you find time, could you take a picture of your setup?

 

[DirtDiggler2823]

Do any of you guys use Flow Sensors? I know DIGITEN makes flow sensors in various sizes. They are hall effect sensors. I am just throwing this out there because if your intake gets blocked, one could setup their return pump on a relay that will trip if flow gets cut off as a safety feature.

I put in a bean animal setup that has a dry emergency pipe that sits above the water line of the sump. If my drain clogs, the water should make splashing sounds as it uses the emergence drain. I am curious about the flow sensors. Could you post a link, please?

 

[Metasyntactic]

I've been thinking of building a mixing station where you have a barrel of RO/DI barrel and a barrel of high salinity brine. They Pi could partially fill a third mixing bucket with RO/DI and then use something like a peristaltic pump to pump brine into the mixing bucket until it's the right salinity. A conductivity sensor with a temperature probe could determine salinity in my tank and mixing container. If my salinity is too high, it just makes a lower salinity batch when it does my water change.

Then I'd only have to maintain my water changes by occasionally mixing a new batch of brine. My question is, if I trust the conductivity/temp probes enough to accurately calculate salinity. They could easily make my tank hyposaline or hypersaline if they're off.

Any thoughts?

 

[DirtDiggler2823]

I've been thinking of building a mixing station where you have a barrel of RO/DI barrel and a barrel of high salinity brine. They Pi could partially fill a third mixing bucket with RO/DI and then use something like a peristaltic pump to pump brine into the mixing bucket until it's the right salinity. A conductivity sensor with a temperature probe could determine salinity in my tank and mixing container. If my salinity is too high, it just makes a lower salinity batch when it does my water change.

Then I'd only have to maintain my water changes by occasionally mixing a new batch of brine. My question is, if I trust the conductivity/temp probes enough to accurately calculate salinity. They could easily make my tank hyposaline or hypersaline if they're off.

Any thoughts?

Best bet is to keep that process manual until you can guarantee quality control of some type.

 

[Ranjib]

I've been thinking of building a mixing station where you have a barrel of RO/DI barrel and a barrel of high salinity brine. They Pi could partially fill a third mixing bucket with RO/DI and then use something like a peristaltic pump to pump brine into the mixing bucket until it's the right salinity. A conductivity sensor with a temperature probe could determine salinity in my tank and mixing container. If my salinity is too high, it just makes a lower salinity batch when it does my water change.

Then I'd only have to maintain my water changes by occasionally mixing a new batch of brine. My question is, if I trust the conductivity/temp probes enough to accurately calculate salinity. They could easily make my tank hyposaline or hypersaline if they're off.

Any thoughts?

The salinity probes are expensive and notorious (even harder the ph) for bad readings due to environmental various factors (air bubble, stray voltage etc), and this is not a critical function /chore for reef keeping which is why I never prioritized this.
That said, we added pH probe support recently (using atlas scientific ezo), and we are rolling out opensource/open hardware ph circuit currently (so think of this 3.0 feature), and calibration features (under development as we speak). This allows us to support these similar probes (ph, EC/Salinity and ORP) in a reliable fashion. We'll continue to improving analogous features (macro and anomaly detection) as part of 3.0 release (next thanksgiving). These things in turn will give us atleast a platform to experiment with complex scenarios like you mentioned.

 

[Metasyntactic]

The salinity probes are expensive and notorious (even harder the ph) for bad readings due to environmental various factors (air bubble, stray voltage etc), and this is not a critical function /chore for reef keeping which is why I never prioritized this.
That said, we added pH probe support recently (using atlas scientific ezo), and we are rolling out opensource/open hardware ph circuit currently (so think of this 3.0 feature), and calibration features (under development as we speak). This allows us to support these similar probes (ph, EC/Salinity and ORP) in a reliable fashion. We'll continue to improving analogous features (macro and anomaly detection) as part of 3.0 release (next thanksgiving). These things in turn will give us atleast a platform to experiment with complex scenarios like you mentioned.

I'm not sure which salinity probe you're referring to but I was specifically looking at using a temperature probe ($10) and a conductivity probe (about $130) to calculate salinity. I could see the conductivity probe being less accurate in a sump where biofouling might taint the results but it should be pretty accurate in a mixing tank where there wouldn't be any biologicals.

You probably could even mount a probe in the return line where high flow would make it hard for biologicals to foul the sensor.

Also, is anyone using solenoid valves? I've been looking at k-rain irrigation valves. Even though they're meant for fresh water systems, I've been in contact with the manufacturer who insists they'll handle salt water. There are some stainless steel parts exposed to water in it so I'm not sure how much I believe them. They're so cheap, I am thinking of buying one and setting it up with a bucket, pump, and some old tank water just to see what it looks like after 6 months. Also considering taking it apart and seeing if I can machine any parts that touch salt water out of pvc. I'd really like to be able to have a pi shut down flow to parts of my tank.

 

[IlliniCoastie]

I put in a bean animal setup that has a dry emergency pipe that sits above the water line of the sump. If my drain clogs, the water should make splashing sounds as it uses the emergence drain. I am curious about the flow sensors. Could you post a link, please?

These are what I am talking about. The reviews suggest that people are using them with Adruino and RPi for monitoring flow for various applications.
https://www.amazon.com/DIGITEN-Effe...TF8&qid=1544796636&sr=8-2&keywords=digiten+1"

 

[theatrus]

These are what I am talking about. The reviews suggest that people are using them with Adruino and RPi for monitoring flow for various applications.
https://www.amazon.com/DIGITEN-Effe...TF8&qid=1544796636&sr=8-2&keywords=digiten+1"

Looks like an impeller type - I wouldn’t want to use that on a drain since the cavity has an obstruction as it’s expecting water to turn an impeller to produce pulses on the output sensor. Also be careful of surprise brass bushings or parts - I like inspecting to be safe.

 

[b4tn]

So I had some very strange behavior with reef-pi last night. I am still bench testing so it is not connected to my tank.

Sometime back I fried my ULN2803 by accidentally shorting the output so I removed the 2803 and everything tested out fine. I removed power last night to put in one of my new 2803's and on power up one of my dosers (built in RPI PWM) came on 100% and stayed on. I could manually run it and it would run at the timer set 50% speed, turn off, then eventually turn back on to 100% full time. Several reloads and reboots later it still did the same. I checked the wiring and all checked out fine so I deleted the jacks from the UI, re-added them, and rebooted. After doing that it no longer came on and ran manually via calibrate just fine.

I check the UI this morning one one doser was running as scheduled all night but the problematic one ran once as scheduled and did not run the rest of the night. I did some testing with the schedule and doser 2 always ran as expected. The timer did not work at all for doser 1. I did many different time combos and duplicated them on doser 2 so both should have acted the same. Always the same thing, doser 2 worked fine doser 1 did not run on its schedule time. I deleted every single light, temp probe, ato, timer, doser and rebooted. I rebuilt the doser rules and now both are working as expected. I am slowly adding rules and equipment to see if I can get the same thing to make sure there is no conflict anywhere.

The question is everything was working prior to powering down and adding the new chip. I currently have the 2803 chip back in and equipment re added with no issues yet. Now I have been tweaking the rules and equipment testing how the rules work and learning what I can and cant do. Is it possible the database somehow got corrupted? By removing and re adding I reset everything back to fresh?

 

[Diamond1]

@Ranjib @wykat I'm having some issues with getting my dosing pumps working.

The first is both pumps are running at the same time. I have GPIO 18 and 19 enabled for the jacks and each one of the jacks is assigned to one of the pumps in the dosing tab. I used GPIO pins 13,14,15,16 to create virtual equipment on/off switches to determine the pumps run direction and this works as it should.
When I select the pump associated with gpio 19 neither one of the pumps runs.
When I select the pump associated with gpio 18 both pumps run.
According to the dosing pump build guide on Adafruit both GPIO 18 and 19 are used. On Github @wykat says only gpio 18 is used either way I get the same result.
Not sure what I'm missing, and any help would be appreciated.
I did recently update from reef-pi 2.0.0-rc-2 to the newest 2.0 version.

The other thing I noticed (which doesn't affect the way the pumps run) is that when I go to calibrate the pumps, unless I have a motor speed and duration set in the main dosing pump section I can't get the calibration tab to run the pumps with the values I used. I can run the pumps by just clicking the run button in the calibration tab without any values as long as there are duration and % values on the dosing tab.

Hope all this makes sense.

 

[b4tn]

@Ranjib @wykat I'm having some issues with getting my dosing pumps working.

The first is both pumps are running at the same time. I have GPIO 18 and 19 enabled for the jacks and each one of the jacks is assigned to one of the pumps in the dosing tab. I used GPIO pins 13,14,15,16 to create virtual equipment on/off switches to determine the pumps run direction and this works as it should.
When I select the pump associated with gpio 19 neither one of the pumps runs.
When I select the pump associated with gpio 18 both pumps run.
According to the dosing pump build guide on Adafruit both GPIO 18 and 19 are used. On Github @wykat says only gpio 18 is used either way I get the same result.
Not sure what I'm missing, and any help would be appreciated.
I did recently update from reef-pi 2.0.0-rc-2 to the newest 2.0 version.

The other thing I noticed (which doesn't affect the way the pumps run) is that when I go to calibrate the pumps, unless I have a motor speed and duration set in the main dosing pump section I can't get the calibration tab to run the pumps with the values I used. I can run the pumps by just clicking the run button in the calibration tab without any values as long as there are duration and % values on the dosing tab.

Hope all this makes sense.

The calibrate only working if there is a value in the timer is a known bug. @Ranjib is tracking it.

It looks like you have everything configured right. Stupid question, did you enable PWM in the config file?

 

[b4tn]

Also, in your screen shot one of the dosers is disabled. Not sure if you noticed that.

 

[Diamond1]

PWM is enabled. I

I have tried with both enabled and disable the same result either way.

 

[ScottBrew]

So I had some very strange behavior with reef-pi last night. I am still bench testing so it is not connected to my tank.

Sometime back I fried my ULN2803 by accidentally shorting the output so I removed the 2803 and everything tested out fine. I removed power last night to put in one of my new 2803's and on power up one of my dosers (built in RPI PWM) came on 100% and stayed on. I could manually run it and it would run at the timer set 50% speed, turn off, then eventually turn back on to 100% full time. Several reloads and reboots later it still did the same. I checked the wiring and all checked out fine so I deleted the jacks from the UI, re-added them, and rebooted. After doing that it no longer came on and ran manually via calibrate just fine.

I check the UI this morning one one doser was running as scheduled all night but the problematic one ran once as scheduled and did not run the rest of the night. I did some testing with the schedule and doser 2 always ran as expected. The timer did not work at all for doser 1. I did many different time combos and duplicated them on doser 2 so both should have acted the same. Always the same thing, doser 2 worked fine doser 1 did not run on its schedule time. I deleted every single light, temp probe, ato, timer, doser and rebooted. I rebuilt the doser rules and now both are working as expected. I am slowly adding rules and equipment to see if I can get the same thing to make sure there is no conflict anywhere.

The question is everything was working prior to powering down and adding the new chip. I currently have the 2803 chip back in and equipment re added with no issues yet. Now I have been tweaking the rules and equipment testing how the rules work and learning what I can and cant do. Is it possible the database somehow got corrupted? By removing and re adding I reset everything back to fresh?

Did you have the output set to reverse initially and then forward the second time or opposite of that by chance?

 

[b4tn]

I am no good at troubleshooting without hands on. But I would try disconnecting completely wires included one of them. Double check the polarity you have set and connections to get one working. Then try adding the second one.