It worked????
Ohmigosh, ohmigosh, ohmigosh!!!!!!!!!!

great job opy!.....now ship it to me! haha!
really though, really nice setup. that's just something else on the list that i need to learn how to do.

yeah....screw patents......

AAAAAAAmazing! coolest setup on a pico!

Nicely done. Seems like your drivers have better low current performance than most drivers like the Buckpucks.

Just got home and done acclimating my new corals from my LFS's sale, I completely underestimated what the turnout would be at this thing holy crap. They opened at 9 and we showed up at 9:15 and waited 20-30 minutes (in the rain of course) to even get in the door, and then spent an hour squeezing through and around people to see everything and waiting for my number (127 ) to get called. Then 15-20 minutes of working with an awesome salesman to pack a large box full of stuff for my sister, her fiance and I and then an hour and a half or so waiting in line to buy the stuff and get out of there. We didn't get out the door until 12:30 or something, it was basically 20 minutes of getting stuff done and 4 hours of being in the way and freaking out that the stuff I wanted was going to be gone by the time I got it in a bag with my name on it.

Anyways I got 9 ricordia florida (4 green, blue, yellow, orange, red and purple), a couple small candy cane frags, and my sister's fiance and I both went in on a nice looking 5 headed hammer coral and a rock with 4 different leathers on it that we are going to try to frag and share. And then, when I was second in line almost ready to pay, I walked up to a display tank they have by the register that is normally all NFS but noticed a couple little frags tucked in the corner and ended up nabbing a small nice looking white and red acan frag with one head and at least 4 babies forming.

I still haven't decided how I am going to divide all my stuff between my pico cube and my picotope, for now all the small stuff is packed in the cube for a day or three until I see what everything looks like when settled in. Probably 5 ricordia, a candy cane and the acan will stay, and a small head of the hammer coral and a small frag of finger leather once they show signs of being happy Plus I saw the appleberry montipora in person today and DO WANT. If I don't win they do have a small frag of it for sale but its $100, almost as much as I just spent on everything else...

Pics later, my lights are off for a couple hours

Also thanks for the compliments guys and @ evilc: the drivers are nothing fancy, just the LM3404 typical application circuit @ 400kHz. Probably nicer than the buckpucks in some ways but they also need a resistor change depending on how many LEDs you want to run and the inductors whine like none other when dimming if you aren't careful with the pwm.

It's got to be the 400kHz operating frequency. That will make for smooth operation at low current. I'd be the Buckpucks are running at a much lower frequency (they have an erratic cutoff just below 200mA). I'd love to dissolve the potting on one of those one day and see whats inside.

Here's my stuff:


I'm going back for day two in about 8 hours, they are somehow getting another large shipment or had a bunch of stuff stashed and I have to go just to make sure I don't have to have any of it Hopefully going to be there a half hour before opening this time


They only go down to 200ma? I'm kinda surprised actually, my guess is it's just a little 8 pin uC like a pic with a logic level mosfet, inductor and capacitor (maybe 2). If they actually had competition I bet they would be selling for 8 or 10 bucks each...

edit: so, how about those acans under actinic?

Looks like you made some nice scores!
Be sure to feed the Acan, and it will grow.
I like to use Frozen Mysis.

whats in here??

Just got back, we were like 5th in line today and they had 20 assorted $5 frags and 20 $10 sps frags plus a bunch other for 15-20. The exact kind of deals I was looking for Only took an hour and a half or so this time and half of that was because we were there 45 minutes before opening.

There were a bunch of people with their eyes on all the cheap corals so while I wanted to clear half the rack I kept it down to 4; picked up a 50-60 polyp yellow/green zoa rock, a single headed green acan, a 1x2 frag of what I think is a brain coral, and... a small, very well healed/encrusted green birdsnest. I wanted an encrusting or cap montipora frag of some kind but there were no montis at all in the cheap section and the montis in the normal price section hadn't changed since yesterday and were... well picked through.


That would be a partylite "infinite reflections" candleholder. Super cool when burning candles, but just looks like its full of whatever stuff is nearby the rest of the time which appears to be my rolls of solder wick, my helping hands magnified parts holder and a box of airline tubing stacked on a half built computer. For me that sounds about right

I basically did a draft with the ricordia and ended up with a blue thats about to split into 2/3, a teal, a green and an orange in this pico. The sign said "acclimated to 250w MH" and they are quite pastel looking compared to my other rics in my picotope so I'm thinking they might all do some color changing. Also theres the new green acan in the middle and the maze brain, which was fairly plain looking under MH in the $5 rack but something about the LEDs makes it the new brightest coral in my tank. The thing glows like I only have the blues on all the time


The birdsnest fell and was sitting on a ricordia, it couldn't have been there more than 10-15 seconds but now it has two small spots where the flesh fell off It seems like the damage happened right away in maybe an hour or so and now there has been no change in appearance in like 6 or 8 hours so I think it is stable... If it gets worse I'm going to have at it with a bone cutter though... We'll see I guess.


And the fts:


I'm pretty close to the part where I just let it grow for a while, just a few frags to gather from my sister and my picotope and a couple other things I'm working on. Oh yeah and the other fish store I frequent does their anniversary sale in November

Now just to convince myself to start gluing stuff down...

simulated sunset/sunrise?! omgzor! i think we need a time-lapse.

I've tried pretty hard to do something like that but I've never been all that into cameras and I don't know if it is possible to do that with either my (point and shoot) camera in picture or video mode or with my (surprisingly good picture quality) webcam. I don't know the camera terms for what I need to do but basically the camera adjusts to make all my pictures look basically the same brightness and after I meticulously set up like 20 shots I end up with 10 blues and 10 whites that all look pretty much the same...

My other sister and my uncle are the camera people in the family and I'm going to make one of them help me do it once I get my stocking and arrangement to a semi-permanent state in a month or so though. It looks about like you probably imagine it does though, about the light of a single small blue LED moonlight fading up to full actinic and then fading from there to a ~14k look. It's pretty cool, everything is wide open and happy by the time it hits full power

Bah, true to form I won nothing, in fact nobody I know did and we had... a couple tickets in there lol.

Game plan is wait a month or two until I see some growth to know everything is happy and then hit up Fraggle Reef since they have that same montipora. If the birdsnest does alright that means I should probably be fine to add montis right? I'm wondering if I should try to get my hands on an inexpensive frag before I spend that kind of money on a chiclet?

Wow, looking really nice with all the new stuff.
I like the Maze Brain and the Acan, as well as the Cloves you have peeking out from the back.

It wouldn't hurt to dip that wounded SPS.
You could do a Lugol's Iodine dip or dip it in pretty much any over the counter coral dip.
If you do Lugol's, do:
1 cup tankwater
1 drop lugol's iodine
3 mins

Thanks :)

I just followed your directions with the lugol's and it started to open back up within a couple minutes of putting it back. It looks pretty good and I believe the alive parts fully extended all day today but it was straight from a fresh shipment to the LFS so its been in 3 tanks and 2 bags and 1 ricordia in the last 3 days... I'll be impressed if it survives all of that even if it looks fine now. Is the dip supposed to be a one time thing? Or do I repeat at some point?

So I ordered a couple of these little fan/heatsink combos and they showed up today so I just spent an hour or two drilling and tapping and soldering and now I've got this:



The fan and LED both run off a single 5v@2a supply and while the (12v) fan is barely spinning everything is cool to the touch. For now the LED is just running directly from the 5v through a 3 ohm resistor and getting about 550ma because I didn't have the right resistor values but next time I make a mouser/digikey order I'll get it running at 1000ma. I might decide to rig up a proper LED driver for it but meh, don't really see the point just for one LED that doesn't need to be dimmed since the 5v supply is a switching supply with a constant voltage. I'm going to have to paint the inside of the cover and maybe add some sort of baffle to help with light spill but I'm liking it so far Also actually having the top fit close instead of leaning on the picotope light I had back there should help reduce evaporation.

On an unrelated note I have seen at least two, possibly 3 stomatella snails with really cool patterns similar to my virgin nerites on their shells. I'm hoping I got at least one dude and one chick (snails work that way right?) because they are never for sale anywhere, I've read they reproduce readily, and they are as cool if not cooler than any snail I've paid money for.

If you can make that tank into a stomatella breading ground, all the better. I hate how unavailable they are. I have only ever got them as hitchickers. I would buy dozens of them if they were available.

Hmm, I wonder how hard it would be to set up a divided 10g or something to raise both stomatellas and virgin nerites. I think both would be a lot more popular if they were actually available... I seem to be a whole lot better at growing various types of hair algae than all the slimy coatings and diatoms that the snails like though. Maybe because my snails are doing their jobs while my hermits just eat snails and coral foods?

Anyways so my power is out right now and I first set up my battery powered air pumps to see how they work. I like my water levels so they are 1/8" from overflowing when the power is unplugged and I'm getting tons of spray everywhere in the tank vicinities. So I have the generator running until either the power comes back on or it runs out of gas. Hopefully the former. I've decided I'm going to do some testing with my pumps and see if either of the pumps in there are efficient enough to run off of a battery for an extended period of time.

The maze brain put out some wicked sweeper tentacles when the flow and light had stopped, it has been doing small 1/4" ones at night but these were well over an inch long, luckily there isn't much around it yet. Hopefully it doesn't start extending those with the flow on, I don't have room to give anything an entire inch of space lol.

Oh sweet, power just came back on.

my lfs has hundreds of stomatellas. he threw in two for me for free when i picked up my nass snails. now i have like 5 in my pico. if i get alot more i'll start shipping them out to people..lol

the tank is looking awesome by the way!

Thanks, I think my LFS has a lot of them because I've had one in the bottom of the bag more than once when buying corals but never really seen them in their tanks. I've noticed they are more reclusive during the day so that probably has something to do with it.

I just completed an hour of surgery on my light, the 4 blues at 700ma have been replaced with 3 royal blues at 1000ma. Watching them fade in for the first time right now and I did no testing first so I have no idea how bright they will be at 100% They are at 60% right now and looking like they will easily pass the blues, pics later

I also just got a shipment notification of the UV LEDs I ordered that will replace the 4th blue LED I removed, hopefully they get here soon. Also ordered some reds from dealextreme (backordered with no ETA...) and I'm thinking about swapping my cool whites for two of the new XP-Gs and a red or an RGB. Don't get me wrong it looks great with just blue and white but this way I'll be able to set my tank to look hot pink for pictures if I want since the red will be on its own driver on the arduino I'm mostly just curious what adding a little red looks like so I'll see when (if) they get here and decide then if its worth the work to add it in.

So just when I was starting to learn a few tricks to get pics of the blue LEDs now the royal blues are quite a bit different. The side of the birdsnest that was getting the most light bleached pretty bad and the blue candy cane to a lesser extent and I don't want to mess with the light just to take pics so this is about the best I can do for now:



I have the light dimmed to about 2/3 and have it moved forwards a ways to remove them from the brightest light so hopefully the bleached corals can recover, I've already messed with the flow and the lights enough in the past couple days and I think relocating them would probably just make them more angry... The bare spot on the healthy branch of the birdsnest has mostly healed which leads me to believe it is happy besides having too much light on the other side for a while there. I dunno any ideas? Am I doinitwrong?

I put about 1/3 of a stick of magic putty into the lower left of the scape to replace the quick unstable stack of rocks I cobbled together after the shelf collapse a little while back with something that holds frag plugs instead of using them as structure.

I keep having to mess with my pump and I'm thinking about rigging a small external closed loop possibly with a 12v computer watercooling pump so I can control it using an arduino pwm output. Maybe with two pumps so I could do some cool alternating flow/wavemaker effects but the pumps are pretty spendy at ~50 bucks each.

My virgin nerites have started to leave eggs on the glass and rocks so I've stopped cleaning the glass and plan to remove the micron fabric from my HOB when they start to hatch. I'm pretty sure they are fertile because there is a small pink colored male that devotes about 50% of his time to making that happen lol. I don't think I have anything that will eat them so if a couple can successfully navigate the pump rotors during their 4 day long free-swimming stage I should have some new snails maybe?

you really have an awesome pico setup, i'm especially interested in your arduino microcontroller. where did you order the controller and the led shield from? would you be willing to help me out with mine when I get to that point in my LED build?

The arduino concept is awesome for prototyping and if you have plenty of space to work with but with the tight spacing inside my light and all of the features I wanted to include I had to take the various "blocks" of the circuit and redesign it onto a couple compact circuit boards. I gave up a lot of the easy expansion and flexibility because while I'm poking around in the dark getting the software going, I knew pretty much exactly how I wanted the hardware to be.

If you want to do something similar I would probably order something like an arduino duemilanove board and a character LCD along with buckpucks to run your LEDs. I found it to be pretty easy to make the arduino control the LEDs and have a basic LCD readout, but now I'm trying to add other stuff for it to do at the same time without messing up the LED part of the program and I'm lost I'll do my best to help you though

i'm not very familiar with arduino but i have used java before, is it possible to create a new class to control other equipment? i'm assuming you're talking about a thermometer display? also which website did you order from? i'm having a hard time find the arudino board and lcd shield on a website in the us

I ordered everything from mouser since I made up my own boards, I did order an AVR programmer from adafruit and they have quite a bit of arduino stuff there though and they shipped quick. You might have to wire up your own LCD board, the process is laid out clearly here. They tell you to use an obsolete library for the software but the wiring all works for the newer "LiquidCrystal" library that I found to work much better.

I don't know java or any other language really so I'm not sure what you mean about classes... The issue is that I have is that the arduino can only be doing one thing at a time and having it change the dimming value every 10-15 seconds, update the clock every minute and update the temperature every 15/30/60 seconds is beyond my abilities without just writing a massive long program that probably wouldn't even fit in the memory. I'm figuring it out though and I have some ideas I'm trying.

Completely unrelated but I've discovered that the two green ricordea can easily grab and eat mysis without even turning the pumps off I usually don't even bother feeding ricordea because its such a pita but these guys will get mysis every couple days with the acans if they keep taking it so easily. Also the maze brain took a couple mysis today as well, I was surprised how much it could expand to eat them.

i am fascinated with the concept of the arduino. but it is so stinking confusing for me. cptbjorn, i think i will pm you when the time comes to hold my hand through the whole process. i hopefully will be in the led club soon.

on a side note. i just picked up two heads with a baby head of orange and white acan. i haven't picked up mysis yet (tonight) but have fed pieces of krill twice. and it is a PITA. my nass snails won't leave them alone. my candy also ate like a champ.

Stomatellas just spawned Micron fabric is removed now and I had just done a water change so I'm just going to let it go for a while with just the chaeto to filter out the big stuff. We'll see

The acans really like the mysis you should get some for sure. Not sure if all mysis is this way but I have the hikari stuff that is fortified with a bunch of vitamins etc and anything that I can get to take it grows like mad. The baby acan heads that are 1/4" across will even take the mysis that I carefully cut in thirds and hand them with long tweezers.

I'll do what I can to help if you get an arduino

Mysis is goooood. Haven't seen a coral yet that doesn't like it. You just have to make sure you don't add the water it was frozen in into the tank. Lot's of phosphates in some of them. A quick rinse takes care of it.

arduino is an open source java based program. i will look into this a little more for you when i start building my own unit, but for the time being you might consider playing around with the "while" method and brackets to run both at once.

"while" huh? That looks like a much better way of doing it, thanks. I guess I should read through all the basic structures and commands shouldn't I

The birdsnest is starting to look a little better, the bleaching seems to have stopped spreading and the bald spots are starting to fill in. I'm adding legs to my light in the next week or so and I'm hoping that helps substantially, as it is right now the top center of the tank is no mans land with the LEDs on full and if my understanding of light is correct then adding 1-1.5" of distance should help quite a bit for the stuff that is so close to the source.

Also bunch of new additions from a couple different sources in the coming weeks

I already have enough stuff coming soon but I dropped by my LFS and saw some stuff in the cheap 9.99 rack (and 35% off) that I had to have... I got a rock with a couple types of palys that I put in my picotope that I might frag into this pico depending on how they color up (under my picotope's new LED light ). Here's the other two:



If I am remembering correctly the LFS woman said the one on the left is an echinata? The polyps are about the size of large zoas, from the pics I've seen I thought echinatas had larger polyps but I could be wrong. I like it whatever it is, they are more blue in person. Frag is a bit big though and I'm going to have to chop it down, especially since she said it was pretty aggressive with long sweeper tentacles.

And the one on the right was a rock with 6 or 7 small red mushrooms but they started getting stringy on the way home, got even worse when I started acclimating and when I drained all but about 6 ounces of the water and added a drop of Lugol's like I normally do one detached but looked somewhat ok, one stayed completely normal and all the rest melted before my eyes. Not in a subtle way and not slowly; it was like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Am I not supposed to iodine dip mushrooms? I've done it with all my ricordia and with my blue mushrooms

i like the additions! how are they doing under the led's? i just got my arduino in the mail so i'll be playing around with that soon and i'll let you know if i have any luck running multiple controls. have you had any luck with it yet?

Hey guys, any updates?

Ive been following along, and just got time to play with my Arduino last night. I have used the "for" structure from your command Cptbjorn to control the dimming, as well as some of the other passive (for safety) features like time, temp, and pH sensor code from the ReefProjects article. (http://reefprojects.com/wiki/Main_Page)

I am now running into similar problems with updating time, temp, etc while the hour long sunrise and sunsets take place. I will go back in the next couple of nights to see if I cant get something going..


Really just wanted to bump thread

I don't have much to update about the controller, I haven't worked on it in a while due to other projects. I'll get there... Eventually

In the tank everything seems to be growing, especially the zoas which have now all at least doubled since I put them in. I'll get new pics soon. I have baby stomatellas and (I think) nerites right now so I'm kinda letting the algae go a little bit to give more of them a chance, it is surprisingly clean despite me not cleaning anything in over a month though. Just the hair algae

It's probably time to do some updating since I got a box full of stuff yesterday from a trade with Weetabix Thanks again Weetabix

I got a nice frag of blue xenia that appears ready to split, 3 polyps of purple death palys, some white dot gsp and like 6 various sized frags of green and pink encrusting gorgonian. I have everything except several of the gorgonian frags in this pico for now, and while nothing has fully recovered from shipping yet (and me poking around with tweezers throughout the day getting it how I like it) I got some pics:








Also today I went to a LFS to grab some salt and ended up getting a couple mushrooms, the single bright green paly polyp in the pics above (really cool looking with radial stripes), and a rock covered in ~50 blue anthelia polyps. The mushrooms were BROWN under the CF lighting, not a hint of any color in there at all. They were cheap and I thought it might color up over time, so when I brought it home I just pulled the mushrooms out of the water, cut them in half and just dropped a couple pieces in each of my picos. Looked in and saw this, LEDs rock:


The anthelia I got is cool looking but it is big and was pretty much taking over the LFS tanks it was in so I'm kinda scared to put any in this pico. Might frag in a polyp or two though. I'll get more pics in a few days when everything settles in

loks nice man. sweet pick up too.

Yes. Yes they do

I would not put Anthelia in a little Pico like that, it grows faster than any coral I've seen, including Xenia and GSP.
It looks neat, but should really be in a bigger tank.
I hope all the new stuff does really well for you in here!
Remind me what intensity you have your LED's set at right now, if you don't mind pls.

Alright I'll keep the anthelia out of this cube, I can just see it getting down in the back where I can't reach and growing like mad.

LEDs are at 180/255 for the blues/UV (just added the UV in last night/this morning) which is a little under 3/4, and 160/255 for the whites which is a little under 2/3. At some point I'm hoping to get the light another two inches off the water and slowly ramp up to full power over the course of a month or so though to see what happens.

How high off the water do you have the light right now?

Right now my LEDs are ~1" from the surface of the water. I want to raise them up because the way I have them clustered on a smallish heatsink means I have a lot of spotlighting at the top of the tank; the best place to put LEDs is as close as possible while still getting good blending and spread.

Did some cleaning and took some pics last night I got the green/purple zoas in the middle of this one a couple months ago and they are my fastest growing zoas by far, this frag has doubled and a single polyp scrap has turned into 6. Also just got the encrusting gorgonian at the top, can't wait to see what it looks like when it fills in and matures.


Here's the acans, I thought the green one was a goner at one point because I got it freshly fragged and it had been cut through the middle and wasn't even a full polyp. Finally regenerated and a couple babies just popped up in the last couple weeks. The green cloves in the back have been receding for a while since the "rock" I got them on was actually a dying sponge or something. They have sent out "runners" though and there are now little polyps on all the surrounding rocks, I think they are about to start taking off.


You can see my 3 new polyps of purple death palys to the right of the watermelon zoas, the big one just took a mysis so it is closed but they seem happy and get bigger and more purple all the time as they settle in. I also just fed cyclopeeze and the pink gorgonian went nuts but the blue xenia just got mad. I want a big colony of the green/gold zoas eventually but the red hair stuff around them seems to disagree


Whatever the green/blue thing in the bottom center is it just started taking mysis and has plumped up and started reclaiming some skeleton, I'm going to have to chop it in half pretty soon. Also another new chunk of green gorgonian.


And finally a closeup of the $3 green paly I just picked up, this thing is BEAST. It had just taken 3 mysis about 10 minutes before this pic and was open and ready for more, I hope the stomatellas I'm trying to breed know to steer clear.


That's it for now, I'm still working on getting a couple chalices, a monti or two and a bonsai acro to start to fill up the top half which is mostly bare at this point.

sweet pics. i wish i had that kind of acan growth. i have had mine for over a month and not a single new head has grown. good luck with the stomatellas. they are pretty smart. mine just took off now i might start being overrun with an army of them! lol. i love that paly too. it's huge!!!

howd you do your rock? just a mold a mix of aragonite and portland cement?

I've had the acans almost 2 months and here's how they've grown. I'm happy with it but it's not as fast as some of what I've read. I feed mysis a couple times a week and I think that is key. Also the green one actually shrunk for the first month and the red took a while to get going.


The rocks are 1:1:1:1 mix of white portland cement, white silica blasting sand, granular lime and rock salt, and cast in a big bin in rock salt. Fun project but in the future I'm just getting dry rock from Bulk Reef Supply because it was a LOT of work and also either the cement or the lime leeched a ton of calcium and I had to dose 2 dKH of alkalinity per day for a while to precipitate it and keep my calcium from going over 600.

dang that growth is insane!

what's the stringy stuff coming off the rock? All these frags are awesome btw!

The stringy stuff is hair algae, it's there partially because the DIY rock leeches traces of nutrients etc for up to 6 months to a year and partially because I was running zero filtration (no filter floss etc) for a couple months in order to stimulate algae growth to give my baby snails a better chance of surviving.

I've been running a micron fabric filter and picking off what I can for the last week or so and I think it will all go away pretty quickly; my other pico gets fed even more than this one and doesn't have a single strand of the stuff.

Here's what I got myself for christmas, I couldn't wait so I opened it all already



If I can find some time this could get interesting