I don't think that corals will benefit enough to warrant all of the effort that you would put into it unless the imagining and the doing is the fun part. One exception is that the corals would be less likely to be sun blocked by other corals and therefore perhaps have more natural growth patterns. I know of one company that uses moving lights like the indoor plant growers use to move over their corals.
In my case, when you turn the threaded rod, the carriage moved down the rail. I drilled a hole on a small block of white UHMW (much like Teflon ) and threaded it to match the rod. Then I cut it in half. I attached that to the blue part from my son's Erector set. This allowed me to rotate it up and away from the teeth of the rod when I wanted to move the carriage back and forth for resets.
I didn't bother with motorizing it because the switching was too much of a pain back then and I didn't want to buy a very expensive latter logic controller for it . I just played with it long enough to make it work. Yes it worked great but only manually so it really wasn't worth my time except it was fun.
Since then, I built a 2 axis robot plankton feeder using an Arduino micro controller and a couple of step motor drivers which are cheap these days. It is designed to move from tube to tube adding liquid food and water throughout the day. I learned how to do it by asking questions on a few forums.
Now it is comparatively easy to do and I plan to automate my lights when I get some other stuff off my plate. I am also waiting for the technology to settle around all of the new large LED chipsets. They are just about ready to go mainstream.
I can order 100 watt chips made to custom wave lengths for under 50 bucks. I can get star shaped veined extruded aluminum heat sinks that look cylindrical to put a lot of light in a reasonable sized package.
Now days you could have dawn and dusk warm colors and change to whites and blues during other parts of the day. You could even make the light rotate so that it points at a high light requirement coral as it approaches and swivels back to continue pointing there as it passes.
You could have standard lighting "¦say from noon until you get home and then start the "œcosmetic day" when you normally get home from work. Then the entire day light cycle could unfold from then until you normally go to bed.
Isn't technology wonderful? Isn't imagination dangerous but fun?
I was walking through Lowes yesterday (A reefer's paradise, I promise you!) and noticed little light sensitive switches that you can wire to lights. Is there a way to connect those to your tanks lights without ripping your fixture apart?
Thanks!
