As I am building the reef-pi 1.0 AIO controller, I made few critical observations
1) The temperature sensor is not as reliable as we want. Sometimes it sends wrong values (like 156 C ), and we don't have any safeguards for that. The connector (audio jack) I use, is just not right. In these connectors often time the male female positive & GND terminal touch each other. When that happens, whole Raspberry Pi does a hard reboot :0( . The system comes back with temp sensor working, but the reboot is a vey bad for disk and unacceptable from controller perspective. I 'll update the guides to recommend rj11 or even jst connectors. If you are using audio connector, power down Raspberry Pi , before connecting the probe/audio jack. I'll add safety check across temperature and ATO controller to auto-disable the sub-system when something out of bound happens.
2) The dfrobot ATO sensor wire is not long enough. I realized after testing it in mybiocube 29 (i was using them on pico tanks for couple of months) the length. The breakout board is somewhere in the middle of the wires. I had to remake the connectors after extending/reducing the wire lengths. Looking at the breakout board, its not that coplex and I may opt for moving that circuit in the perf board itself. That way we can just use any photoelectric sensor. And we can choose the ones with longer wire length (or whatever we prefer)
3) This new aio perfboard is pretty neat
, this is the first time I got the whole circuit working in one-shot, and in smaller form factor. I am excited about the etched PCB for reef-pi. This will make so much more sense if we move the ATO circuit inside it as well.
4) The 3 Kessil controller is working like a champ
. It was not a smooth ride as well. After the initial setup, I obseved kessil bliking :-/ . Silly of me, this is the third time I repeated this. per channel minimum threshold was introduced to fix this, it just not exposed through web ui. So I never do it, and then this happens, and I use the API ./curl to update the min threshold value. Though there is a workaround, its not acceptable. Given the official LED build guide promises a kessi I l controller, I think we should have that min/max configuration UI, and explicitly call it out in the guide.
So, in summary.. I am working on following things, that will go in 1.1
1) ATO: auto-disable, if pump rums longer than expected. And trigger alert. Recommend some more elbow grease wiring for the sensor.
2) Temperature controller: auto disable if temperature is way out of range, send alert. Check for data consistency using checksum. Dont consider readings that failed on checksum. Update guide to recommend rj11 connector or jst connector.
3) Lighting: UI will allow specifying minimum and maximum threshold. Build guide will be updated to use Kessil A80 or A360 minimum threshold (15 in UI slider which corresponds to 1.5volt)
