I got most of my x-mas all in one build done yesterday night. Had to go back n forth on the wiring bits, at the end I went with some solid core 22 awg wiring , soldered in the boards and some stranded wire female jumpers for the things that I think I’ll may move or swap.
Main perf board (I replaced some of the header pins with soldered solid core wire, later )
The entire circuit is fixed on a thin birch wood plywood ( due to length restrictions of the standoff and m3 screws).
Boards laid out, along side Pi
Everything wired up with female female jumpers (stranded wire), and smoke testing with all sensors (ATO, Temp)
And the dashboard, and multimeter . During these tests, I would physically lift up/down the water levl sensor, touch the temperature probe and see relevant updates in the dashboard (ato pump state changes, temperature controller kicking in etc).
Next, mounting connectors in the housing. I used drill bits to drill the holes, I use a set square to draw lines on the outside of the housing to ensure all the holes are aligned, and somewhat equally spaces (I am going with power jack on the left side, and all other jacks on the right of the bottom panel). During drilling, I went with smaller drill holes then progressively increase the drill bit size till it fits the connectors. I cant recall what their size, but I can share them if anyone is interested (myself dont aware of these details, I just try, fail and improve
)
For this build I am using a housing that is almost double the size of the circuit I need. I intend add buzzer and few things later, as part of post 1.0 development, but point being this can be fit into exactly half sized housing (7"x4", i think)
Once i mounted the circuit on the housing,
I was not super happy with all the mess that jumper wires made, so I changes few of the connections (pca9686 to perf board, and voltage regulator in/out to perf board) from female female jumper wires + header pins to solid core wire, soldered onto the perf board.
Next. mounted everything, and closed the lid, ran another round of smoke test.
Almost ready for service, I have to hookup the ATO board inside, and stick a couple of velcro strips on the back. Thats all, the controller is running outside the tank, till then (I run them for two days at least outside tanks, then they go to my dev tank [pictures cant be shared due to ugly algae
]), before they make their final way to my display tanks
Merry x-mas everyone. Thank you for all the comments, suggestions and everything. I'll make a more polished blog about this build on reef-pi 1.0 release announcement post (with BoM), that I had started in r2r. After that, I'll add the whole build log in official reef-pi doc. I have a feeling it will be lot easier for others to build reef-pi once they can see actual build images and relevant bill of materials etc.
