Nano Reef in the Office

[ScubaSteve]

Very cool build. I love the clean look.

I'm actually building a tank for my desk at work right now too, though mine's just an old biocube my friend had kicking around I'll be converting it to LEDs though, which brings up a point you mentioned above...

The disco ball effect. You can minimize the disco ball effect by keeping the surface calm OR you can pack the LEDs closer together to minimize the separation of the light sources. I've been tossing around the idea of using Steve's LEDs 3-up stars (link) to get 3 LEDs tightly packed onto a single star, and then packing the stars tight together. Basically, this is the tightest configuration possible without doing a custom PCB (Which I am considering...). My thinking is to get the sources tight enough together that they basically behave (more or less) like a single large point source of light like a metal halide and you won't see as much disco-ing. In theory this shouldn't be a whole lot different than a HQI upgrade for the biocube, especially if I run the LEDs without optics. This is the direction a lot of the high end systems are going with, however, those are pendant systems and with the extra height you can get decent spread from a tight packing. I'm unsure how it would work out inside a biocube where the LEDs are close to the water surface.

Have you thought about this at all for your LEDs? And how do you think this would work in the biocube? I'm basically using the same color mix as you and have been debating using the 3-ups to create 1 or 2 tightly packed arrays of LEDs.