Friends,
we hit a milestone today. reef-pi is celebrating its 1 year anniversary at reef2reef. Without the community, and all your support this would not be possible. I would like to express my heartful gratitude for every single visitors of this page and every single builder who gave this project a shot. Let me also use this moment to share some stats and numbers , to give you an idea how far we have come, in terms of software, user experience, and outreach:
reef-pi was originated as a DIY hack (originally called reefer) to fix my kessil controller issue. Later I ended up adding power controller (ac socket control) to ease my water change chores. It was during that time, i felt community could use what I am using, particularly those who has the DIY spriti (and I knew reef community has probably the most skilled DIY hackers). My first and in retrospect probably the best move was to start a thread in reef2reef and streamline the hardwere against raspberry pi (reefer was written to run on any small board inlcuding beaglebone or galileo). This thread has grown into probably one of the highest viewed DIY thread in reef2reef.
The very first release of reef-pi was named
reef2reef, Feb 22, 2017 . reef-pi went into a regular cadence of releases since then with 1 minor release every two weeks after. We had total 25 releases till now, each of them shipping a tiny bit of improvements and bug fixes. Just to bring some perspective, reef-pi first release had no way to add or remove any device using UI. it was all configuration file driven. Our very first builder
@Aaron Smith spent more than a week just to get it going (thank you Aaron).
reef-pi first major public recognition came in May, during Bay area makerfaire, where I put couple of my pico tanks along side reef-pi as an exhibit. reef-pi booth was one of the most visited exhibits, and we won Editor's choice award due to that (although I should attribute it to the corals glowing in dark room, rather than reef-pi, but hey, it was due to reef-pi I could make a case for it).
In June 2017, reef-pi website was launched. Sticking to its core opensource philosophy, the website along with all documentations is kept open for everyone to improve and iterate on. There is still a long way to go, but the comprehensive guides have significantly brought down the initial setup complexity, we literally have folks who get it working in days or hours now, once they have all the electronics (again the Bill of material has helped there). The documentation has been improved by at least four other external contributors (all are reef2reef users). We have visitors across the globe reading through the guides, and the pageviews are increasing steadily.
In past one year, I have personally built around 7 controllers, I have recycled at least 3 of them and tore down 1. Currently, I run 3 of them. This thread has some details of at least 17 other builds, one form or other, they all use some functionalities of reef-pi. This gives me immense amount of joy :-0)
reef-pi 1.0 was released last Christmas, offering features that ease basic reef keeping chores (power control, LED daylight cycle, temperature control, ATO and alert/telemetry). We are working hard on 2.0 release in this x-mas which will bring dosers (already released), wave maker, ph probe, multiple temperature/ato sensor support, camera control and programmable UIs. These features intended to support advanced reef keeping, SPS husbandry in particular. The growth of reef-pi also represents my personal understanding of this complex hobby (and the maturity of my reef tanks).
I want to extend my and gratititude to
@Ryan115 @Cary and other who have step up helping new builders in this thread. Thank you folks
Onto 2.0 milestone ..
. I will be adding the ATO function soon via a small audio connector. I have MH lights, so no need for the lighting control for me. Thank you for the compliments!
