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Old 01-26-2013, 08:52 AM
ScubaSteve ScubaSteve is offline
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Default Kevin and Emme`s Biocube of High Powered Awesome Build (LEDs and Typhon Controller)

So a number of months ago I had this great idea: I'm gonna make me a frickin' tank for my office. Yeah! That`s what I'll do! I'm a damn genius!

I picked up an old Biocube 14 from a buddy for the very fair price of beer and got it on home. Set it up with some rock and let it start cycling in the hallway (yes, that is the most convenient place to cycle a tank. Trust me). I decided I wanted to play around with LEDs because I might upgrade my main tank to LEDs in the summertime once I've finished my PhD; this biocube would be my experiment. So I decided to do it on the cheap. A few cheap eBay LEDs... some cheapo drivers... just enough to make the bare minimum. After all, it was just going to be at my office.



Ya.... that idea didn't last long. Em and I started to grow attached to that little tank, and once we got a couple of clowns in there, we realized we kinda liked it. Damn! I'm now one of THOSE guys with multiple tanks. Oh well... Also, the plans for the LEDs kinda escalated... fast... like really fast. I now have an excessive number of LEDs primed and ready to go into this tank... The Biocube of High Powered Awesome!

And thus begins our build thread...

There are tons of threads on the intertubes using the RapidLED kits. Meh, too basic for me. I wanted something custom. But my god is there a sore lack of information out there for doing Biocube builds, especially if you want to do anything outside of a kit. So with this thread I really hope I can fill in some of the knowledge gaps.

The LEDs
First of all, a big thanks to Milad at LED Group Buy. He set me up with some awesome LEDs for this build. Em and I wanted to go the full spectrum route and play around with some of the newer LED ideas out there. The LED mix I eventually settled on is:

4x Cree 3-Ups (2x XT-E Royal Blue, 1 XT-E White)
2x Ocean Coral White - 3-Ups(Red, Green, Cyan)
4x True Violet (405 nm) - I went this route as I wanted more of the black light effect

I opted to use the 3-ups because I wanted all of the LEDs as close together as possible to minimize colour banding. I cannot emphasize how much I hate f***ing colour banding in LEDs. It just looks retarded. I'm happy to see some of the manufacturers are reducing the spacing between the LEDs so that they more or less act light a single light source and you only see the weird colour shadows and colour bands on the outside edges. Because of the small size of this tank and the lack of optics on the LEDs, the funky edges should mostly fall outside of the tank. We'll see how it does. I've got some tricks up my sleeve to get rid of colour banding if it does rear its head and get annoying.



You'll see in the pic above that I've put the LEDs into two tightly spaced clusters, essentially acting like two light sources. Without going to a custom PCB (which I did contemplate) this is as close together as you can reasonably get the LEDs.

Heatsink
Got a great 10"x4.25" Heat sink from ModularLED. For anyone else doing a biocube build: You could potentially use a heat sink up to 12" but 9"-10" seems to be best as you can still fit cooling fans in the hood to blow down the length of the heat sink. Width-wise you could go up to 6" but I wouldn't go past that, especially if you went with a longer heatsink. Really, IMO anything past 4.25" on a biocube isn't really worth it. The ModularLED heatsink I got conveniently fits well into the biocube. The bosses (ie. the plastic lugs) that the old PCs screwed into fit nicely between the fins of the heatsink, giving a nice and sturdy fit. Use the screw holes in the reflector to mark out your drill holes for the through holes to attached the heatsink.




In this pic I've already drilled and started to tap the holes to hold down the LEDs. For reference I used 5/16" long #4-40 pan head machine screws with nylon washers. The washers are key otherwise your screws could short the LEDs to the heatsink if you're not careful. For this reason I've only attached the OCWs by the very outside edge because the LEDs have exposed leads above the PCB they're mounted on. Go slow and use lots of lube when you're tapping otherwise you'll break the taps. 4-40 taps are small and weak.



All done! I am using 1" long #5 flathead wood screws to attach the heatsink to the biocube hood. Ideally I'd use machine screws but the existing PC set up is mounted with wood screws and the bosses on the hood were designed more with the wood screws in mind. If you do decide to use a #5 or #6 machine screw and are having trouble getting it to self tap, heat the screw up with a lighter, then screw it in. Old plastic machining trick. I've also counter sunk the through holes for the flathead screws using a 82 degree, three flute counter sink bit. If you've never done this before, it's very easy to do but takes a bit of care and patience. After drilling your through holes with a drill press, toss the counter sinking bit in the chuck and bring the bit down to the heat sink. Put the bit in the hole and turn it backwards by hand a bit (allow the heatsink to move when doing this). This will perfectly center the countersinking bit in your through hole. Turn on your drill press and go at it SLOWLY. Unless you have a drill press where you can adjust the spindle speed the counter sink bit will have a tendency to chatter in the hole. This will a) scare the **** out of you and b) give you a rough hole. Just go slow so that very fine flakes of metal are coming off and you'll avoid chatter. If it does chatter and gives a rough hole, keep calm and don't move the piece you're countersinking. Just go at it slowly to clean up the hole and proceed as per normal. Sink the holes wide enough for the #5 screw head to fit flush with the top (the countersink hole should be roughly 5/16" to 3/8" in diameter).

Power Supply and Drivers
For this build I decided to go with the Meanwell LDD-700-H drivers. They're super cheap (when you don't get them from Mouser like ended up having to do) and have wicked performance. Dom (daplatapus) and I spent a stupid amount of time trying to track down LDDs at their normal price of $5-6 per but they have been impossible to find. A suitable alternative would be the BuckPuck drivers if you're having trouble finding the LDDs. Thanks to Chatouille I got my hands on one of the awesome 4-up LDD driver boards that the guys over at RC are designing. I'm pitching in where I can over there to add some extra options to the future boards, so I may end up swapping out this board in the future. To account for that I used 24 pin machine IC sockets on the boards so that I can pop the LDDs off this board and put them onto the new board.

Here's Em populating the board. She literally just learned how to solder when I took this pic and she's already soldering like a ninja! (She'll also probably kill me for putting up this pic )



Here, I'll embarrass myself too



Here's the board all done with the IC sockets:



And all gussied up with the drivers:



Thing of beauty, no? I'll be inplementing a bunch of tricks with this board. I may or may not take the time to write up all of this, but if you are using these drivers, feel free to PM me for a discussion and I can teach you. Hopefully the tricks I am using will be implemented in future boards over on RC (they already are) so it'll be self explanatory.

For the power supply I went with a Meanwell NES-100-24. This is an adjustable 24V power supply. Awesome power supply, great price. Need I say more?

Controller Enclosure
Man, I've been having fun with this one. I wanted something slick. Something worthy of showing off. I decided to go with a nice, see-thru polycarbonate enclosure from McMaster-Carr. Most Canadians won't be able to order these but through work I can get them. They are the bees knees.

I opted to go with the Typhon controller for a number of reason but it came down to having all the options I wanted and, because it's Arduino based, I can easily modify the sketch. I do solar research at work, so I'm pretty picky about lighting control. I have some ideas on how to better simulate natural sun cycles with the controller that I want to implement when I have the time. But the trick with this is that I want to have the screen and buttons accessible while it's mounted in the enclosure. So, of course, there was only one reasonable solution: CNC mill that muthatucka!



Here it is all finished:

http://s927.beta.photobucket.com/use...ml?sort=3&o=11

A bit more monkeying around, adding holes for the buttons, etc... this is what you get:



Fits like a glove! When I get up in the morning I'm going to make some button extenders so that that buttons are easily accessible on the surface. Pics will follow. I'll also be mounting the controller to the lid once I can get some 7/8" long flathead 4-40 screws in the morning.

I also added stand offs to the driver PCB so I could also mount it to the lid. Here it is all mounted up:



More to come tomorrow as I finish this up!
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