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

Ranjib · Feb 9, 2019

Bigtrout said:
Is their any news on the PWM frequency issues?

@theatrus and Mealnie both submitted a patch to fix this for pi and pca9685 resepectively, its waiting on me to test them on actual hardware. Likely in next two days you'll get an answer from me

Bigtrout · Feb 9, 2019

b4tn said:
I love that website. I still feel guilty thought when I order $2 in parts and get it free over night lol

Yes arrow is pretty good especially on small orders

Ranjib · Feb 9, 2019

Bigtrout said:
Yes arrow is pretty good especially on small orders

Amazon has this as well: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OGLCR3W
I had purchased one, but I didnt end up using it actually, cant recall exactly why, but there was some issue...

Hookster15 · Feb 9, 2019

Timer question for skimmer, I would like it to run 24 on and 24 off.

crusso1993 · Feb 9, 2019

dmolavi said:
The specs for this state it's for panels up to 0.075in (2mm). This is gonna be a tough nut to crack. I could countersink the hole, but it would need to be done by hand, as there isn't enough room for my drill to get into where it needs to be.

These are nice to have...

https://www.rockler.com/flex-extens...NEqqYkpewYElNoprRJ6HBxcmC5bu7K0EaAukPEALw_wcB

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JVPGZP6/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_e-VxCbPD13WNY

Ryan115 · Feb 9, 2019

Hookster15 said:
Timer question for skimmer, I would like it to run 24 on and 24 off.

In the timer set up, you should be able to set it to: Day of the Month = */2 and change back after 86400 seconds.

b4tn · Feb 9, 2019

The *\2 works but I had a ton of issues with getting the timer to disable using this method. I had it set up like this in the hour field to turn on every other hour and it worked but the timer would not disable. In the end I had to put the hours in manually so I could disable the timer for macros.

Ranjib · Feb 9, 2019

Ryan115 said:
In the timer set up, you should be able to set it to: Day of the Month = */2 and change back after 86400 seconds.

One thing call out from safety/reliability perspective is if pi had a hard shtdown then the automatic turn off after the given period will not work. As after power comes up the original timer will not kick off (since its due time is passed) and hence no revert action. So, if the revert duration is a very long (say in multiple hours) then it may be safer to just create a separate timer for turning off the equipment.

pickupman66 · Feb 9, 2019

@Ranjib MAJOR ISSUE today. as you know I had issues with my system alerting last week on the ATO. I have been traveling all week away from home and now that i am home, something was amis. my Clam did not look good. Plus one of the BTA walked around. I went to move a frag away from it and thought WOW, that water is COLD> I went to check Reef-pi and could not login. I put my cooking thermometer in the tank and it read 68°! HOLY MOLY! This is not good. I could not access reef-pi so I power cycled it. as soon as it came up, it started blowing up my phone with ATO alerts and also the LOW temperature alerts. I checked and I am about 4 gallons low. This means the system has not been working properly for at least 4 days. I dont know where to go to diagnose this. It appears to be operational at this moment as I can access and heater and ATO is working.

ALSO, since the reboot today, I have no historical graph data. all of that is missing.

Tank is at 70° but i am sure it got as low as 65° during the night.

I am on version 2.2 and I show no errors in the web GUI. All equipment was powered as my lights were on and all water movement pumps had power.

Bigtrout · Feb 9, 2019

Did u have a power blink possibly where the reef pi got shutdown hard and then booted back up?

I made my power relay NC on my heaters so that if the reef pi goes wonky i still have heat...

crusso1993 · Feb 9, 2019

pickupman66 said:
@Ranjib MAJOR ISSUE today. as you know I had issues with my system alerting last week on the ATO. I have been traveling all week away from home and now that i am home, something was amis. my Clam did not look good. Plus one of the BTA walked around. I went to move a frag away from it and thought WOW, that water is COLD> I went to check Reef-pi and could not login. I put my cooking thermometer in the tank and it read 68°! HOLY MOLY! This is not good. I could not access reef-pi so I power cycled it. as soon as it came up, it started blowing up my phone with ATO alerts and also the LOW temperature alerts. I checked and I am about 4 gallons low. This means the system has not been working properly for at least 4 days. I dont know where to go to diagnose this. It appears to be operational at this moment as I can access and heater and ATO is working.

ALSO, since the reboot today, I have no historical graph data. all of that is missing.

Tank is at 70° but i am sure it got as low as 65° during the night.

I am on version 2.2 and I show no errors in the web GUI. All equipment was powered as my lights were on and all water movement pumps had power.

Sorry to hear about your troubles and hope everything recovers!

pickupman66 · Feb 9, 2019

Bigtrout said:
Did u have a power blink possibly where the reef pi got shutdown hard and then booted back up?

I made my power relay NC on my heaters so that if the reef pi goes wonky i still have heat...

Not that I know of. I am using the DJ power bar.

Bigtrout · Feb 9, 2019

pickupman66 said:
Not that I know of. I am using the DJ power bar.

Ah ok then you cant go NC contacts...

Matt Carden · Feb 9, 2019

That's why I'll be building my own power block.

bishoptf · Feb 9, 2019

pickupman66 said:
@Ranjib MAJOR ISSUE today. as you know I had issues with my system alerting last week on the ATO. I have been traveling all week away from home and now that i am home, something was amis. my Clam did not look good. Plus one of the BTA walked around. I went to move a frag away from it and thought WOW, that water is COLD> I went to check Reef-pi and could not login. I put my cooking thermometer in the tank and it read 68°! HOLY MOLY! This is not good. I could not access reef-pi so I power cycled it. as soon as it came up, it started blowing up my phone with ATO alerts and also the LOW temperature alerts. I checked and I am about 4 gallons low. This means the system has not been working properly for at least 4 days. I dont know where to go to diagnose this. It appears to be operational at this moment as I can access and heater and ATO is working.

ALSO, since the reboot today, I have no historical graph data. all of that is missing.

Tank is at 70° but i am sure it got as low as 65° during the night.

I am on version 2.2 and I show no errors in the web GUI. All equipment was powered as my lights were on and all water movement pumps had power.

Thats a bummer, I would go through the syslogs day by day and see if you can pin-point what took place to put it in that state. It would be good to know what may have happened, if it was hardware or software, if software it will help to know where to look. I will try to think of some simple external checks that will notify you if something is wrong, although if your away you would have to have a way to access your network.

pickupman66 · Feb 9, 2019

I wouldn't know what to even look for or when. Is there a way I can just pull the log as a file for the last 5 or 6 days and scan it?

bishoptf · Feb 9, 2019

Bigtrout said:
Did u have a power blink possibly where the reef pi got shutdown hard and then booted back up?

I made my power relay NC on my heaters so that if the reef pi goes wonky i still have heat...

I've thought about heaters a good bit, but for freshwater its better to be cold then hot. I am more concerned about a heater getting stuck on and killing everything in the tank, I am using reef-pi as a fail safe. It does have me thinking of have a backup of some sort to at least notify me if the reef-pi goes sideways but will have to think of what kind of check would be best.

Ranjib · Feb 9, 2019

pickupman66 said:
@Ranjib MAJOR ISSUE today. as you know I had issues with my system alerting last week on the ATO. I have been traveling all week away from home and now that i am home, something was amis. my Clam did not look good. Plus one of the BTA walked around. I went to move a frag away from it and thought WOW, that water is COLD> I went to check Reef-pi and could not login. I put my cooking thermometer in the tank and it read 68°! HOLY MOLY! This is not good. I could not access reef-pi so I power cycled it. as soon as it came up, it started blowing up my phone with ATO alerts and also the LOW temperature alerts. I checked and I am about 4 gallons low. This means the system has not been working properly for at least 4 days. I dont know where to go to diagnose this. It appears to be operational at this moment as I can access and heater and ATO is working.

ALSO, since the reboot today, I have no historical graph data. all of that is missing.

Tank is at 70° but i am sure it got as low as 65° during the night.

I am on version 2.2 and I show no errors in the web GUI. All equipment was powered as my lights were on and all water movement pumps had power.

Oh my god :-(
How are things now? Corals ?
Let me think through this. The loss of usage data is something I am working to fix (it’s expected currently , under hard power reset condition ) . Was reef-pi not working or the entire raspberry pi ?
Can you check the log of reef-pi , particularly around the time when the t went unresponsive ? If nothing it should give you some idea since when it became unresponsive (absence of logs).
I’ll share some details on how to configure watchdog (hardware induced reboot when pi is unresponsive ) once I’m home.
Again I’m very sorry , happy to help anyway I can , and let’s hope livestock impact is limited

bishoptf · Feb 9, 2019

pickupman66 said:
I wouldn't know what to even look for or when. Is there a way I can just pull the log as a file for the last 5 or 6 days and scan it?

I would go looking at the syslog files here :

Code:

bishop@tankpi:~ $ ls -l /var/log/syslog*
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 3193068 Feb  9 21:44 /var/log/syslog
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 5174563 Feb  9 06:25 /var/log/syslog.1
-rw-r----- 1 root adm  238499 Feb  8 06:25 /var/log/syslog.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm  238902 Feb  7 06:25 /var/log/syslog.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm  237523 Feb  6 06:25 /var/log/syslog.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm  238900 Feb  5 06:25 /var/log/syslog.5.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm  238923 Feb  4 06:25 /var/log/syslog.6.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm  237620 Feb  3 06:25 /var/log/syslog.7.gz

Rasbian only keeps the daily log uncompressed the previous days are compressed (.gz files) to unzip them do this:

Code:

sudo gunzip /var/log/syslog.2.gz

Then to look at the contents of each the file(unzip them first as above):

Code:

more /var/log/syslog

Substitute each syslog.1-8 in the command to look at each file, let us know what you find and if you have any questions let me know and I can help with the linux stuff.