reef-pi :: An opensource reef tank controller based on Raspberry Pi.

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Bigtrout said:
Ok, they are standard 5730 led strip lights in the fixture.

First question, im assuming the power supply is 12v? When you put the npn mosfet inline, you put it on the negative line in to the fixture?
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Correct the power supply is 12v. I had it connected as it was laid out in the diagram above, https://learn.adafruit.com/assets/2693 It's no longer getting hot, etc, it just doesnt appear to be varying the voltage like I thought it would. When I move it to 1 it starts at 9.75v and goes up. I have not hooked anything up to my fixture, i only had my meter connected to the pwm outlet, I wanted to see what the voltages were doing before hooking anything up, trying to play it safe and not fry my China led. :)
 
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Tom Bishop said:
Correct the power supply is 12v. I had it connected as it was laid out in the diagram above, https://learn.adafruit.com/assets/2693 It's no longer getting hot, etc, it just doesnt appear to be varying the voltage like I thought it would. When I move it to 1 it starts at 9.75v and goes up. I have not hooked anything up to my fixture, i only had my meter connected to the outlet, I wanted to see what the voltages were doing before hooking anything up, trying to play it safe and not fry my China led. :)
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whats your pwm frequency ? try to lower it and test...
 
Ranjib said:
whats your pwm frequency ? try to lower it and test...
Click to expand...

That might be what I am missing where do you set the frequency, I might have missed something in the settings. I looked for a guide on what each setting did in the lighting section but couldnt find one, like active high/active low. I had it set under the profile to fixed, min-0, max-100, start - 0 and then was playing with the slider, where is the frequency set?

nevermind, I found it oun the settings page, zzzing...I will lower it to 50 and see if that changes anything.

:)
 
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;Woot;Woot;Woot;Woot;Woot;Woot

That doesnt even come close to expressing how elated I am at the moment, going down actually made it stay about the same, however going up started lowering the voltage and I could see on my meter it started to vary the voltage OMG

I will need to do some more testing on the existing setup to get the ranges for each step so I can try to get close to what they have. So far I have found that setting the frequency to 320 appears to be giving me close to the same results that I remember. At a setting of 10 it was swinging the voltage from ~4 to 6, maybe not as quickly but that is something I will also verify with the existing dimmer jumper.

The big question is how do you dial it in or do you just play with it like I am doing to find a frequency that appears to work best? I can't tell you how excited this is, this is all with the breadboard so will have to solder it up but I think I am close. I'm still concerned about the amperagee, and pulling the +12v from the hat, thinking of pulling the +12v directly from the input and running each +12v to each outlet. Grounds still need to be taken back to the pi but this is my initial thoughts right now.

Pretty stoked now to say the least :)
 
Tom Bishop said:
I am using this diagram - https://learn.adafruit.com/assets/2693 which is from this guide - https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-strips?view=all#wiring
The article talks about using a TO-220 fet and lists this one - IRLB8721, my local electronics place did not have that particular fet but he had this one which should be as good IRLZ44N, another TO-220 low level logic fet. Right now I have no load I just have my meter connected to the output and I see constant voltage, it's no cycling at all and when I set the light to 1, the meter shows 9.75 volts and increases from there.

I am trying to control a chihiros led light, I havve 2 of them, one with 99 led's and one with 36 led's, they have an in line jumper that allows you to step down or up the intensity, 7 steps. When I hooked my meter up to the output of the dimmer, it was constant at 12v on its highest setting, but when you went down the voltage went down accordingly but cycled, it was not constant, see this post for dimmer details - https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/r...-on-raspberry-pi.289256/page-441#post-5539596

I did try to take a reading from my meters' frequency setting (20K HZ setting) and this is what it showed:
Full power - step 1 - 0
step 2 - .02-03 cycles from here out
step 3 - .-4-.05
step 4 - .06-.07
step 5 - .06-.08
step 6 - .07-.09
step 7 - .08-.10

Yeah I as just wanting to control the intensity throughout the day along with the time, I can order the pre-made controller but somehow would like to know if that is the answer before hand. I did try both PWM pins from the pi and they should the same results, I'm just trying to figure out where to go from here from a testing perspective to help figure things out.

Thanks for the information and if there is any additional information that is needed just let me know. :)
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I bought one under the Fzone name for my son's freshwater tank. The one I have does 10 timed settings and a % for each. It is a simple two wire circuit from the controller up to the led. I haven't looked more into it though to be able to really tell you what is going on.
 
Ecoscape Reef Rock
What is this error about

Failed to initialize pca9685 driver. Error:remote I/O error. Should I disable pca9685?
 
What a beautiful sight!?

Dashboard.JPG
 
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Ranjib said:
Do you have pca9685 hooked up ? If not disable it from setting and delete any jack that’s using this driver
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The single wire temperature probe doesn't require pca9685, does it?
 
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dmolavi said:
Bah, the atomic pi only has 26 pin GPIO, not the 40 pin header that the standard rpi has. That stinks, i'll bet reefpi would have cooked on that (and for $35 on kickstartr, a really good deal. i might pick one up anyway)
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I never looked at these things. In fact I try to avoid pretty much everything thats fancy and based on something thats more original.
My experience has been that we are not limited by CPU/Memory. Yes there are cases where we have hit the ceiling , and may be there are some use of extra CPU/Memory. But 99% of the time we are actually struggling with neat features, reliability, documentation etc. Put other ways, my personal focus has always been to get the story right, i.e. get a functional controller running that can does the daily chores of reef keeping and can be built by most DIY enthuthiast. Sticking to original Raspberry Pi and avoiding most fancy things helped me achieve that, as I ride on the shoulder of those giants. We get to use standard raspberry pi/adafruit community help, and continued software improvements. This does limit us in some way, but I think its worth the compromise. Its ok to not be able to run both webcam and the entire controller in pi zero, as long as it can does the main controller bits, for each of us, easily and forever without hiccups.

In the very beginning when I started reef-pi development, reef-pi was named reefer and I was aiming to make it compatible in all sorts of hardware (Raspberry Pi, Intel Edison, Beaglebone ... etc), I also had all sorts of fancy things (like level sensors , etape). But after doing all of that for good 8 months, I realized that very few of those things actually help me in better reef keeping. In fact it was clear that I can do reef keeping without a controller, but having one that does the monotonous work and adds some extra safety gears is actually worth my time and effort.

Now, all that being said, after reef-pi 3.0 release I think we'll nail down some of the advanced features as well (peristaltic pumps, wavemakers, clustering etc) and I am open for suggestion on moonshot ideas, but I would still emphasize on use case first. i.e. we have to think about what this particular thing gives us, just more of anything is not useful, but if we have a use case (for example, we may decide that we'll do time series analysis on the temperature /ph data and predictively alert folks when equipment or tank act anomolous, instead of fixed threshold based alerting) that actually benefits reef keeping , and the new fancy things is required for that, then I'll definitely consider it

I dont mean to be rude, but I want to keep reef-pi features (software and hardware) coherent, for it to be effective and for me to be able to maintain it easily. Hope you understand :-)
 

IF YOU HAD TO TAKE A REEFING EXAM, WOULD YOU PASS?

  • Yes!

    Votes: 32 45.7%

  • Not yet, but I have one that I want to buy in mind!

    Votes: 9 12.9%

  • No.

    Votes: 26 37.1%

  • Other (please explain).

    Votes: 3 4.3%
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