My In Wall 150 Build

[Lampshade]

Haha, te coraline was a pain. I started it with the scraper on a stick, wow.... that was slow going. Then i got the magfloat scraper attatchment. It was as easy as cleaning the glass any other day, i have no idea why i ever used a reach scraper after using this thing, i love it.

[Lampshade]

I guess i should update, no pics, but some info about my controller i've built. I built my own Arduino controller. It has been many many many hours of programming and learning what this this thing can do. But in the end i feel that i've got a great base running and should be able to add on a lot of fun things in the future.

Right now my controller:
-Reads PH and turns kalk reactor flow on/off based on what is being read. I run a calcium reactor and have been increasing the load more and more as my SPS is growing like crazy, and it has started to affect my PH. Adding kalk has helped with the swings and keeping PH around 8.0. I have both set as a drip, so if the kalk sticks on or something it won't nuke my tank.

-Reads temp and turns heaters on/off. I have a heater that's been running for 10+ years flawlessly, so i've left that set at the current setpoints, but if the temp goes too low, i have a second heater turn on. If the temp gets too high I turn on my backup fan to help cool.

-Text messages if the temp/PH is way off. With a link to the website so i can check up on it quickly.

-Lights are controlled on by sunrise/sunset times based on GPS co-ordinates I can enter. Right now it's set for the Gold Coast, so that in the winter i can have longer days, and summer shorter to help with cooling. My actinics turn on for 1 hour, followed by my first halide which is on for 10 hours. My second halide is on for the 10 hours before sunset with one hour for actinics at the end. If the day is shorter than 12 hours, the halide are on for 9 hours, or 8 or even 7 for a few days of the year.

-An LCD to display all this info, and a control menu for overriding lights/pumps, etc on/Off. Also some setpoints can be changed, but i've left most in the core program because I don't see myself changing them much.

-All posts to a Google sites locked for only me to view. This is because i also have a webcam posting an image and optional stream to the website, and didn't want to have every person in the world looking through my tank at me eating chip in my boxers on the couch. haha, you can't see that, but still feels weird having it totally open :P.

-I'm using Pachube.com for all the data logging. GREAT service, historical records, pretty graphs, very easy to get my data from. I was going to do this all on my computer, but now i don't have to :P.

-If the power goes out the controller will still work, but obviusly the heater, etc won't. It will still log data for up to 3 hours to send after the power is restored. I also built in protection to not restart my halides for 15 min if it's only a short power out. I had my power flicker once and killed a bulb by having it try to fire for a couple hours before i noticed.


So that's pretty much everything I have so far, pretty much the same i could do with a normal controller. Main reason i did this was cost(overall this cost $75), and that i also enjoy figuring stuff like this out. I've re-learned C++ programming, and learned HTML and java while making the website. As much frustration this caused at times, i sadly found it fun.

Another fun part is everyting i get to add now that the base is working. I found a chip that reads color and intensity of light. For $12 I should be able calculate PAR output and log the colors, so i can see the color shift in my halides and decide when to replace them based on that. I'm also looking at adding some LED's to supliment my halides. This will be easy to control with the PWM outputs already on the arduino. I'm also looking into a DIY mag drive pump, you could call it an MP-80? I have a DC motor that should blow away anything out right now and it's reasonably quiet. So once i can steal a friends CNC for a couple days and make some plastic coated magnetic coupling pieces and mounts, i should be able to give this a shot. Hopefully without turning my fishtank into a blender. There's a video of someone doing this and blender was an understatement.

If anyone's building a controller or thinking of it let me know and I can hopefully help out. Tomorrow I'll try to post some pics of my mess of wires leading up to the current masterpiece of tangled wire, and some pics of how i'm displaying the info.

I should also update my tank pics. Everythings been doing great the past few months. I didn't think it was that long ago i added pictures, but it looks like stuff has grown a lot.