Joining the club... my new 240G build :)

[Spaced Cowboy]

VERY nice build/thread! Subscribed.

Thankyou

It'll start to get even more interesting soon, as I start to venture into less-familiar territory while the tank cycles. The next few months I'll be designing and building an LED lighting system, and (crosses fingers) rolling out my DIY controller... I'm currently dividing my time between writing softwar, soldering hardware, and general tank stuff. Oh, and there's work, of course

Simon

 

[Spaced Cowboy]

Progress, or apparent lack thereof

So, it may seem that there's been no activity on any front for quite a while now, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. I'm hard at work, hacking away on two main things:

1) Lighting:

The design is finished, and I've cut the aluminium to size for one test 'pod' to cover about 2' square, drilled the holes for each LED, tapped out the screw threads, and it's ready to assemble/wire. What's put this a bit on the back-burner was a teensy mistake when ordering the PCB for the LED controller - I somehow didn't check the 'add soldermask' button on the website, so the PCB I got back was useless. That meant another two-week cycle waiting for it to turn up again.

Normally I'd roll my own circuit boards for prototyping, but this time there were too many vias (conducting holes between the top and bottom copper layer of the circuit board) for my liking. The only way I can do them at home is to laboriously solder a little copper wire between the top and bottom, and there are placement constraints in addition - because it's not perfectly flat when you've soldered the wire, you can't place the vias underneath any chips, or in fact too close together. One day I'll get an electroplating rig for the garage, but that day has not yet dawned...

2) Software

This is where the lions part of the effort has gone. I've been hard at work rewriting the code I'd already written, because I have a newer, better, design for the controller and sensors. I'm still keeping this one under wraps for the time being, but I really like it

In the mean-time, the tank is happily cycling away - I didn't put much live-rock into it this time around, so it'll take a bit longer, but I'm happy to wait. It's taken about a year to get this far. I can wait another few months

Simon.

 

[RyanTurner]

Cool. Im really digging this build thread. What language are you coding the software in? Also, I've been wanting to order that exact tank somewhere for a while now (8x2x2?). What was your experience with glass cages? I always hear so many negative things about them, but their price is almost perfect.

 

[Biggar]

Congratz on your baby and nice set up. Subscribed! Im putting together our 265 right now and getting ideas. ( :

 

[Spaced Cowboy]

Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.

Things may appear to have been quiet on the Western front, or chez nous, anyway... Not really [grin].

The major work at the moment is going into the software driving the controller, and since I only want to announce that when it's finished, y'all are gonna have to wait... I'd say I'm getting closer now - it's maybe 60-70% done. Another couple of months would do it, if we weren't about to greet our first child! So probably now another 6 months out...

There's some more re-design work I'm doing on the sensor/controller interface at the moment - the sensors are interchangeable, so you can plug a pH sensor, an ORP sensor, a temperature sensor etc. into any of the standard sensor-sockets and the system figures out what it ought to be reading. I had a scheme for doing that, but it turned out I'd underestimated the number of pins needed by 1. The new method looks better anyway - as well as being far more flexible. If I want to put 48 temperature sensors along the LED array, I'll soon be able to, and then unplug them and not worry about plugging the same sensor back into the same slot to get continuous readings from that sensor...

In the meantime, I've resurrected an old JBJ 28-gallon tank and set it up as a quarantine tank in the garage. We've got our first two inhabitants (predictably, 2 clownfish) who seem to be pretty happy at the moment. They'll stay there for 4 weeks total (another 3 or so) before being let into the main tank. So far so good - they're active, feeding - from day 1 in fact, and no sign of any nasty stuff as yet...

The two clowns - click to see larger​

Please ignore the plastic castle Given that my wife is very accommodating about pretty much anything happening in the tank in the living room, it would have been a bit gauche to turn down her "Oh, that is just darling!" moment in the LFS Besides, the clownfish seem to like it, and it's actually kind of cute when there's one fish looking out of the top window, and one looking out of the bottom archway It actually works better to provide them with some cover than the plastic pipe fitting I'd originally placed in there...

There's an Eheim canister filter plumbed into the back of the JBJ to give a place for the bioload to mature, as well as a hang-on-the-back skimmer to keep the water nice and clean.

Circulation is provided by 2 koralia nano pumps oscillating {on/off : off/on}, as well as the original 2 pumps that came with the JBJ; ought to be plenty for a quarantine tank. It's bare-bottom of course, in case we have to medicate. There's an AquaController 3 Pro handling the lights / temperature / pH / cooler (came with the JBJ etc. Not so much use for the cooler right now ...

I ultimately intend to move to a larger hospital/aquarium tank - some time in March, and link in the water-change system I already have in place for the display tank. That's waiting on a shed that I'll be building some time after the baby's arrived, maybe I'll use a couple of days of the "baby bonding" time I'll be taking off work. For the time being, though, the garage is all I have, and there's no space for the 50G tank to be set up so the JBJ is what I've got.

Simon

 

[Spaced Cowboy]

Cool. Im really digging this build thread. What language are you coding the software in? Also, I've been wanting to order that exact tank somewhere for a while now (8x2x2?). What was your experience with glass cages? I always hear so many negative things about them, but their price is almost perfect.

Thanks for the nice comments

I'm coding in C++ - Being an Apple developer, I'd really have liked to use Objective-C, but C++ is a good second choice.

The 8x2x2 tank is fantastic. I'd have gone for 8x2x3 if I could possibly have fitted it into the house, but we don't have the space - it's a 1500 sq. ft. house and the tank already eats quite a bit into our dining-area. What I will say is that the extra 6" over the 18"-back-to-front that I had in the previous tank makes a huge difference, far and away more than I expected.

As for Glass-cages, my experience couldn't have been better. The lady on the other end of the phone was courteous, prompt in getting back to my queries, clear in explaining their production capabilities (when I was designing the sump compartments), and the tank was delivered on-time, well-wrapped, and in perfect condition. The tank is built like, well, like a tank - the other kind! There is plenty of cross-bracing, edge bracing and corner bracing, but it doesn't get in the way and it can't hurt. The edges are sealed neatly, although there was a small smear of silicone on the face of the rear pane. A razor quickly got rid of that. They do custom tanks, and I got the Starfire option for the front. If I was doing it again I might go for a coast-to-coast overflow, rather than the two in-tank overflows. Making a bean-animal overflow was a little bit challenging with the standard reef-ready setup.

Of course, there are downsides. Shipping is expensive to the west coast, although dwarfed by the cost of the tank... Their guarantee is worthless, it only lasts 90 days. You can't put water in for 1 month after it arrives, typically. This wasn't a problem for me, I didn't have any water in it for about 6 months after it arrived! I was busy doing all the preparation previously detailed in this thread...

All in all, I'm very happy with the tank, and until I win the lottery, I'm guessing this is the tank I'll be using

Simon

 

[Spaced Cowboy]

Congratz on your baby and nice set up. Subscribed! Im putting together our 265 right now and getting ideas. ( :

Thanks It's all getting very real right now. Baby furniture arrives today, clearing out a room in the house etc.

Do you have a build-thread for your 265 ?

Simon

 

[Spaced Cowboy]

Stop the world! I want to get off!

So, it's been a while since I posted here - even finding the thread was something of a job, it being on the 13th page now. I *do* have a good reason for that, and he looks like this:

Matthew, born 23rd Feb, weighing 7.56lbs and standing 19.5" tall
​

Now that mother and baby are home and doing well, I'm going to start work on the lighting system over the next few days. I've come to realize that there really isn't any "spare" time when there's a baby in the house, so I buckled, and bought some AquaIllumination Sols. I'll do the DIY LEDs over the frag-tank and quarantine tank when I get around to it.

I don't much like the sol's support brackets, so I've ordered some transparent plastic from US plastics, I'll cut out the end-braces on the CNC router, and attach them to an 80/20 extruded Aluminium bar I have lying around. If I manage to get it to look how I want, the lights will seem to be floating above the tank...

Simon. (off to feed the baby. Again.)

 

[muttley000]

Congrats! Looking forward to your mount mod.

 

[Spaced Cowboy]

My own little lazaretto

Wow! was it really over a month ago that I last posted here!

Ok, well things have been happening, but just much more slowly than before. Before I started stocking the tank, I wanted to get a quarantine system up and running, and that took longer than I thought it would.

The plan was to use the garden shed as the location (since we're, ahem, space constrained) and I thought I'd set up another identical auto-water-change/topoff system as I have on the main tank, so that if anything broke on the main tank, I could steal parts from the quarantine tank until I got a replacement.

So, first the shed had to be built, then have power routed to it (including permits etc.), then the parts had to be ordered and installed. Now, though, I'm getting there.

Since where I wanted the shed to sit has an easement across it, I had to get creative ... The shed was built with wheels (4 x 2000 lb capacity) so it can be jacked up and moved, if the power company ever want to get at the lines overhead. It also "plugs in" using a trailer-park junction-box. The electrician and the city all signed off on everything so it's all legit Here's a couple of shots of the shed and its wheels...

​

And inside it looks like this (left then right shots). The goal was to set it up so I could have somewhere for my electronics-type hobby stuff while we re-purpose the garage more as storage, since we've just lost a room...

​

In fact above left you can see some LED strip-lighting I'm trying out for macro-algae lighting over the sump. It has a colour temp of 5500K, so ought to work reasonably well. We'll see.

Finally, to the right of the desk in the above-right picture is the quarantine tank itself, and a close-up of the water-change system. I ran another 3 lines (waste, new salt water, new fresh water) from the main tanks to the shed and buried it in the ground while we were laying power to the shed...

​

So, now the quarantine tank is up and running, I can start to think about actually adding some fish

Simon.

 

[robferrari]

That's a good update with a sweet setup there. What kind of material did *you use for the top of the wood bench on the left? And what are the dimensions on the shed? Can't wait to see some fish!

 

[Spaced Cowboy]

That's a good update with a sweet setup there. What kind of material did *you use for the top of the wood bench on the left? And what are the dimensions on the shed? Can't wait to see some fish!

Thanks

The wooden bench has some 'Elephant Bark' laid on top of the plywood benchtop, then a ~12' by 2' by 0.25" piece of glass on top. The glass makes for a tough easy-to-clean surface, and the rubber matting means that any little imperfections in the wooden surface don't become pressure-points on the glass.

It worked out well, but in retrospect I ought to have given myself a little bit more margin for error than I actually did (about 0.25" end-to-end ) because getting it in was ... worrying ... [grin]

The shed itself is 12' by 9', which comes in just under the max-before-planning-committees-want-to-take-a-look of 120'. It's also just about the largest I could fit without disrupting flower beds etc.

Anyway, next major project is to drain/refill the pool for Summer, and *then* I can start stocking

Simon

 

[Spaced Cowboy]

PAR for the course

So having gone with the AI Sols, I wanted to see how well they were lighting the tank. The goal was always to have darker areas and more well-lit areas, I didn't want to blast everything in the tank with bright light, I wanted something that looked a little more natural.

So I started looking around for PAR meters - there's a couple of DIY projects but nothing calibrated and "ready to go", so I caved and looked at the professional ones. Apogee's meters seem to be the normal ones used, but after tax they were coming out at $400 or so. However... I noticed that they're calibrated to 5.0 µmol m^-2 s^-1 per mV, which means you just need to connect them up to a multimeter that reads millivolts accurately, and multiply by 5 to get the PAR rating. Excellent - the sensors are a lot cheaper than the full-blown meter, so that's the way I went.

Here's the results:

Sorry for the large image, it's a wide tank Just below the water-level and in the center of the tank, it's at 960 PAR, which is pretty good Some of the numbers look a bit weird, but they're more to-do with the fact that it's hard to get a sense of depth from the photo, and if the reading is towards the front or back of the tank, it's much lower than it looks like it ought to be in 2D.

So, I guess the question is: is that good enough ? There seem to be areas that are good, but my gut feeling is that a bit more might be useful. There's another 2 AI units sitting in the shed and I could slot them into the support bar easily enough... That's just a gut feeling though, I don't really know what PAR I need, in order to keep corals... Anyone got any suggestions ?

BTW, the support beam isn't bending, it's an artifact that came in when I straightened the photo to make the tank look level. I'm not a great photographer

Simon.

 

[muttley000]

Nice, where and what did you buy for sensors to hook to the multimeter?

 

[Spaced Cowboy]

You just need to go to the Apogee site's photosynthetic radiation page and click on 'Order sensors' - I went for the SQ-110 model and it worked a treat.

Simon

 

[muttley000]

Thanks Simon