So, I'm halfway through my 13g build that I won't be able to get water in any time soon due to moving plans and had an extra HOB filter so I decided to get a pico going

Implemented so far:
9x9x9 cube (2.5g actual water capacity, 3g with HOB)
1/4" glass with lightly beveled edges and smoke gray back panel
Elos style black silicone (kinda)
Drsfostersmith surface skimming HOB modded with whisper 40 motor.
Jalli 100w heater (for now)
Couple pounds of DIY white live rock
1/2-3/4" live sand
4blue/3white LED Light in acrylic enclosure with DIY driver board
Simulated sunrise/sunset by arduino controller with 16x2 LCD

I'm currently working on finishing the hardware and have started on the software for the arduino controller that is integrated into the lighting fixture; so far plans include an LCD and keys, ATO, automatic light control/dimming based on season and lunar cycle, temperature probes and full heater control, and data logging among many other ideas.



Current livestock:
6 or 7 assorted zoas/palys, 4 mushrooms, ~8 ricordea florida, blue xenia (cespitularia), green and pink encrusting gorgonian, blue and green cloves, 7 assorted acan lords, diploastrea, 4 chalices, a maze brain, blue candy cane, 6 montis (mostly encrusting with a cap and a digitata), 3 acroporas, a birdsnest, pink pocillopora, millepora, blue maxima clam, 3 sexy shrimp, several virgin nerites, a couple dozen stomatellas and a lone blue hermit crab.

Looks like a nice start.

All the angles:








Here’s a closeup of the silicone, I had originally planned on silicone just in the gap a la Elos but it turned out to be easier said than done… I just couldn’t get it how I wanted it and the silicone was starting to skin over so I laid down tape and did an 1/8” fillet on the inside corners.


One from higher up:


Obligatory kitteh pic:


Comments? Suggestions? Especially on the aquascape, I’ve got a kiddie pool full of this rock so I can change it to whatever. I’m hoping to get every square inch of rock covered in corals eventually so I’m mostly wondering if this looks like a good base to build on?

I think it will be a good foundation to build on. No rockscape is perfect, so you just have to adapt.

Sweet, thanks. I think it looks good but I'm realizing there isn't much room if my corals come attached to rocks at all so I'll have to dremel and glue everything but I can deal with that.

Because of the limited space within a pico, I always take my frags of the rocks/disks to conserve space. It also looks better.

Thats the price you pay for a pico I guess.

I like the tank. With the aquascape, I think you could make it more open with less rock. You may not reach the 1-1.5 lb/gal rule, but that rule is mainly for tanks stocked with fish. Corals and other invertebrates have usually much lighter bioloads.

Alright, I ended up deciding that I needed more free sandbed and more open space overall. Removed one small rock and a bunch of shifting and here's what I have now:









Probably looks exactly the same to everybody else but I was staring at this thing for like an hour doing tiny shifts and studying the water flow and in order to justify all that work I'm going to say I like it much better

Also I have rigged a fan and temporary ATO with a water glass up on a book case, some airline tubing and a tiny thumbwheel c-clamp to both hold the end of the tubing in place and restrict the flow to a drop every couple seconds. Its been upper 90's the past couple days and with ~500 continuous watts worth of heat sources in the room (computers and plant lights) its been... toasty up in here

nice cappy!

that looks really good from all sides. i likes it. i likes it alot!

Schweet, thanks guys. Now I get to have it right here next to my computer monitor doing absolutely nothing for a while. One of the LFS here has a tank of nano rock that I'll raid in a week or two for a tiny chunk with some coralline to seed but for now I'm having pH issues, turns out the rock wasn't quite ready and I did some breaking to get all the right pieces which must have exposed some parts that hadn't fully leeched.

Just did 3 pH tests in 2 hour intervals and then did the math on exactly how much HCl to add to my ATO drip to pH constant. Seems to be working so far, I'm back down below 8.5 and it feels like being a doctor and giving a patient medicine in their IV lol. Hopefully I can keep it there but I'm assuming there isn't much living bacteria or anything in there now as pH was way off the charts there for a minute.

i like it!

Cool cube and the aquascape looks awesome!

Cool scape.

So I have been logging my temperature for the last 3 days with a serial port attached DS18S20 to see how the 50w stealth is handling such a small volume for its rating (I am a geek, this is what we do). It's been hot here so during the afternoon/evening the heater doesn't turn on but during the late night/morning its doing its thing. Here's the best I can do to show the 8640 data points so they make sense:



I'm not too concerned about the overall temperature range, but it appears that the hysteresis of the heater in 3g is nearly 2F and the cycle takes around 2 hours when it is going. Anybody know if I should be concerned that it is shooting up 1.5-2 degrees in 15 minutes every couple hours? I would assume that corals never see that steep of a change in the ocean.

In other news I think that I'm starting to see a very light dusting of diatoms Might be able to add a couple snails here in a week or so since there probably will never be any ammonia or nitrite spike

The fast spikes are probably because the heater is rated up to 15 gallons. Smaller heaters would take a longer time to increase the water temperature. I'm not sure a 2 degree spike would be too harmful since all the temperatures are in the normal range. However, you could always adjust the heater down to 80º so the spikes won't be so high.

That looks very sleek. Where did you get the custom glass?

Its from a local place called Perkins Glass, 13 bucks plus tax for the glass, then I sanded and beveled all the edges with wet/dry sandpaper wrapped around a big heavy chunk of 2" aluminum channel. Used a 5g bucket full of water with a length of small tubing as a siphon to keep everything wet and wash away the grit and glass powder, it went quicker and easier than I thought it would.

I also just got a quote from them for a starphire tank for my Mom and was pretty impressed, I sent them an email and then a woman called me and first said they hardly ever deal with starphire because they mostly do commercial glass for storefronts etc but then proceeded to give me a quote half the price of the others I've gotten. Plus its a family owned/operated kind of place and I like that.

Thanks. I'd like to try to make a 10" cube based off the ELOS design. instead of having wall-to-wall coral like i do now in my 1 gallon, it would be nice to have an island of rock with space around the edges.... like a Japanese rock garden

Yeah my glass/silicone style was based mostly on Elos, I didn't get my silicone nearly as clean as they do but as long as you don't look too close it looks really good. I've seen a couple Elos tanks at a LFS and it seriously looks like they drew them up in CAD and used a replicator from Star Trek to make the tanks; whoever they have building them is a freakin silicone rock star. Anyways if I were to do it again I would probably get enough glass for 2 tanks and then build one right after the other since the glass is so cheap, then just use whichever one looks better and give the other one away.

I decided to change my heater to a 100w Jalli titanium one that I have for my other build and the temperature is much more stable now, I'll post a comparison chart once I get it dialed in to exactly 80F and get a full days worth of data collected. I'll be using this heater for the time being but I am now planning on making a custom 25w titanium heater that will be controlled by my Arduino if/when I get that going.

I tested my ammonia/nitrite/nitrate levels today (0,.25,40 ppm) and then did a 1g waterchange and added a 2 bristle worms and 2 cirratulid worms. Once that nitrite is back down to zero (it got up to 1 ppm at its maximum) its CUC time probably about a week from today. I'll probably add a small GSP frag at that time as a "canary" and then I'll start adding zoas once the GSP shows signs of being happy.

I have the LED and Arduino hardware 90% planned out and I'm just waiting for a day I feel like making PCBs to get moving on that. If I can figure out the software side this should end up pretty cool

So a couple things have been changing, first of all the "Bio System Power Filter & Oxy Surface Skimmer" that has been on my parent's picotope for the last month started getting super noisy and after a bunch of messing with it I determined that the motor/impeller assembly on it sucked, both literally and figuratively. The shaft was rusting and the motor itself had started rattling and the decision was made to upgrade to an AC70 on that tank so I took the old filter and was able to swap in the motor/impeller off my Top Fin/Whisper 40 to gain the adjustable surface skimming and larger volume of the Bio System filter without having to listen to it whine at me Works great and I seem to be getting even more flow now.





Also my nitrites were still hanging around the .25-.5 mark after 10 days so I decided I needed to bring in another source of some bacteria and grabbed about 1/2 lb worth of nano rock from a LFS. I'll probably end up taking out or breaking up the biggest rock eventually but the rest are just what I wanted.





And a FTS with the room light on. I couldn't figure out how to get the colors to come out true; the rock and the sand actually look the same color IRL.


Here's the comparison I promised of my new heater to the old stealth, and the new one is still getting more stable as time goes on. I know the stealth will perform better in a larger aquarium but IMO after testing it pretty thoroughly compared to a (cheaper) titanium heater they don't really deserve the reputation they have as super stable heaters. Kudos to their marketing team.



And last but not least a CUC has been ordered from reefcleaners John hooked me up, I'm not 100% sure how they are making money but I can't complain Virgin nerites, nassarius, ceriths, cheato and mangroves are shipping monday, haven't decided if I'll put any mangroves in this tank yet though.

My ammonia and nitrites have been reading zero the past couple days and my order from reefcleaners showed up today so I put 10 of the 5 dwarf ceriths I ordered in this tank and the other 50 in my picotope A couple virgin nerites will go in in a couple days once the ceriths show signs of being happy, plus I have a little puff of chaeto and a couple twigs of flame algae in the HOB now.

There was a tiny aiptasia on one of the LR pieces that I didn't take care of right away and it has now relocated to an unknown location Hoping it got caught in the filter or something...

Figured its time for an update. The tank is doing great, I have 7 or 8 small zoa frags in there and a little frag of GSP. I've been waiting for a day where everything looks happy to take some pics but it never seems to work that way... Anyways the picotope light just isn't doing it for me and I finally had a chance to work on my lighting a little bit. My first try at bending the acrylic for the enclosure was a miserable failure (tried using an oven instead of the blowtorch I'm used to) but I got the heatsink all drilled/tapped and loaded up and also finished my driver design and built one over the weekend. Fired right up on the first try, here's a pic:



Works great and preliminary testing (me holding it over the tank with my hand trying to dim it all possible ways preferably without dropping it in) shows that it'll probably be plenty of light. 4 blue and 3 cool white crees are MUCH brighter than the picotope lamp and probably bright enough for pretty much anything that could fit in a pico Can't wait to get it on there permanently to see how everything reacts

I'll try bending the acrylic again in the next couple days, plus I still have to make the arduino board and start the whole process of figuring out a decent program for it. Lots of work left

your light looks really good. what shape are you trying to bend the acrylic?

pretty sweet.

I was just trying to bend a basic u-shape like I have done several times before for overflows etc. I think the oven would work great if I had the equipment to vacuum form but I just couldn't get the 1/4" acrylic to lay down around the form by heat alone and I ended up totally screwing up the surface finish when I used gloves to force it into shape while the whole thing was semi molten. I dunno

I know I can do it with a blowtorch though, I'm not exactly sure why I decided to try it with the oven but second attempt will be with a blowtorch.

sweet tank!!! I'm setting up to do the same thing. what light did you use before you got your LED set up? how do the seals work out on those edges?

we need a new FTS

Alright new fts then Today I just added a couple mushrooms (completely brown and stretched out at lfs, completely blue and tiny in my tank) a couple clove polyp frags (blue and palm tree), and looks like a couple zoas got tossed in the bag as well but they haven't opened yet. Not everything is happy right now but good enough I guess. Also hopefully this is the last pic taken before the LEDs go on:



The acrylic bending went as planned on the second try but after seeing it I've changed my plan a little and need to borrow my Grandpa's router table this weekend to chop it down shorter and have to wait for smaller fans to come in the mail now. But it looks like I'll have LED lighting by this time next week. And pics of it by this time next month

@airman- The light on there now is the stock light from a JBJ picotope. In a tank this small it is enough light to keep zoas etc from stretching but I want more of course And the silicone seams work great, I think it is important to use a high strength silicone if you want to do it with gaps though. I used Dow Corning 732 and there is no noticeable sagging or movement so far.

Spent most of the day yesterday working on this little guy:



For people not familiar with Arduinos etc, it's going to be the brain inside my light fixture that will gradually fade in/out my lights for sunrise/sunset, vary the moonlight according to the lunar cycle, buzz at me when the temp is too high/low, stuff like that. Only limit on what I can do is my programming skills. Which at this point in time is a pretty severe limitation, hopefully that will change as I try to figure this thing out

Kinda OT for this forum and I'll probably have to do a light build thread for this once I'm done, but I started out with the schematic/layout for the Boarduino, which is an Arduino compatible clone, and rerouted to my liking and added in a RTC, a 512k eeprom and a DC jack and regulator so that everything in the light fixture will run off of a single 19v laptop charger. Got the board etched and stuffed and cleaned and now I just need a battery for the RTC and I can power it up and start playing with it.

In other news I added a small powerhead. The HOB filter/fuge was giving probably enough flow, but it was also causing a lot of tiny, fast ripples on the water surface which was actually causing too much of a not-so-good shimmer effect when testing the LEDs. At full power it was an almost hard to look at fast disco ball type of thing instead of the calmer slower shimmer I get with the HOB dialed back about halfway. Plus the flow seems more random and even this way and everything looks happy.

Nice build. Got my head churning with all sorts of pico thoughts and getting one started myself. Always goes that way when you see a new build though, doesn't it?

The acrylic enclosure for the light is mostly done, there was a little bit of cracking on the joints but overall it came out better than I expected. Waiting for the fans to come in the mail and then I'll be able to weld in the cross braces that will hold the circuit boards and that the bottom will velcro to. Here's a pic:



Probably going to make a new LED driver board, the acrylic is a little more transparent than I thought and I didn't make the first driver as pretty as I would have if I knew it would be visible. Guess I'll just have to do an LED conversion on the 12" satellite on my picotope with the first board One plus though is that mounting the 16x2 LCD should be much easier now, I can just have it pressed up against the acrylic instead of having to cut a neat looking square hole.

Everything in the tank has acted a little weird since the beginning, I'm assuming due to the concrete rock, but in the last week or so though something just kinda clicked and I'm getting little buds on pretty much every zoa frag and one of the GSP frags has gone from 2 polyps to like 8 seemingly overnight. I've been a little hesitant to spend much on livestock but now I'll start adding stuff; I'm getting a couple ricordias tomorrow and I'm on the lookout for some cool looking small LPS, probably a frogspawn or hammer and maybe a trumpet or candy cane. We'll see.

Got the fixture done enough to start using yesterday and attempted to get some good pics taken today but I just can't figure out how to get my camera to take a picture that accurately depicts what it looks like. The light is BRIGHT, I tried to do a side by side comparison with a multimeter and it matches the light level of the stock picotope lamp at around 20% of the maximum current, and judging by some cree efficiency charts I found I guesstimate I'm getting roughly 4 times as much light at maximum brightness

Anyways the pics don't really do it justice because the camera removes most of the brightness increase but here's a side by side of a pic taken today with one taken last week:


And here's a new FTS. The ceiling lights are actually on in this pic and the wall behind was white when it was taken, the camera has to adjust for the pico light so much that it looks like the lights are off in the room.


One of the closeups came out alright, I've never gotten a pic of these zoas before that looked right but now they show up just fine. Guess I should start taming the hair algae forest they normally live in...


Still working on actinic pics...

Welcome to the club... of not being able to take good pics of LEDs

So I had some fun last night

First I did some surprise reaquascaping, I was poking around with a skewer getting a little slime off one of my zoa frags and noticed a little crack in one of the little ledges. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to poke at the ledge which then broke off which messed up the whole somewhat symmetrical look of the tank so I spent like an hour restacking the left side to get it how I like it again. I ended up removing the rock from the sandbed on the left because I need more lower light spots in the tank. A couple things aren't too happy about the LEDs etc.



Secondly, right at the end of my aquascaping I knocked my spankin new light into the water! t(*_*t)

I got it unplugged, pulled apart and everything rinsed with RO in roughly .25 seconds, blew what I could out with a can of compressed air and let it sit in the hot exhaust stream of my (400w constant draw) heater computer overnight. Did some reassembling and testing and then hooked it back up a couple hours ago (my photoperiod starts at 1) and... works like nothing happened! I thought for sure the fans and the pots were toast, I guess this is why I try to always keep backups. Nothing ever breaks unless it's your only one...

Anyways a LFS is having an anniversary sale this Sat/Sun so I'm probably going to get some new stuff this weekend. 30% off everything plus a bunch of even better deals like 6 ricordia for $60 and and raffles etc. With my luck if I win something it will be the SPS frag pack... I am thinking about some sort of encrusting monti or something for the top of the arch though.

Just read through this whole thing.
I'm really liking what you're doing with the tank so far.
I actually just got a very similar Pico in the mail a couple of days ago, which is what prompted me to read this thread.
Mine looks just like yours, except it's a 10" cube.
For mine I will initially just use sunshine from a large, sunny window for a light source, but I want to eventually do something with LED's.
Something very similar to yours, in fact.
My only problem is that I have NO DIY skills at all when it comes to LED.
I'll figure something out.
Anyway, keep up the good work and I'll be following this thread.

How hard is it to do something like this for my LED lamp? I'd love to have fade in/out. I have no experience with programming though. I Do have some patience and kinda handy but don't know if thats enough lol

Looking good so far

Thanks for the kind words, I'm just copying what I see and read here and trying to pretend I'm not a noob as best I can

@Weetabix: I nearly bought that cube myself when 121a sold it the first time lol. My keyboard already hangs off the edge of my desk as is though and if my tank was another inch bigger I'd have to hold it in my lap.

@sammy: I have never used an arduino before either and my programming skill is pretty limited but I will get it done somehow. If you are technically minded at all I'm sure you can; at the very least I bet you could mooch some code off of someone else here in fact I think someone posted an example of an LED dimming program on the DIY forum here somewhere. I haven't had time to mess with the software yet or I could tell you more.

i LIKE THE LED's! looks sweet!!

Inorite?

You mentioned that a couple of things in the tank weren't happy about the new LED's.
I'm assuming they're having a hard time adjusting to the increased brightness.
However, you made this dimmable.
Doesn't that compensate somewhat?
Can't you start it out at a lower intensity and gradually increase the brightness to acclimate everything?

Yes it is dimmable, there's just something about it glowing like a tiny sun at full power

It was just a couple of the zoas and the mushrooms that took more than a day or two to open again fully but I probably should have been a little more careful about acclimation. Everything is still on frag plugs/rubble and easy to move though and I kinda thought of it as an opportunity to find out where everything needs to be; I found shaded areas for everything that looked unhappy. One of the mushrooms is already starting to lean out a little bit and part of its cap is getting full light, and I know it can come out farther if it wants to because that thing had a 3" long stem at the LFS and now its almost flat on its rock.

The LFS having the sale this weekend keeps adding stuff to their raffle and now has a frag of one of the the most awesome montiporas I have ever seen, I'm hoping everybody else goes for the more expensive prizes because it appears to be an encrusting type and would be perfect. Appleberry is what they are calling it. I've never been much of a gambler but I'm considering buying raffle tickets besides the two free ones I'll get for going to the sale both days

And finally I got my arduino board working and am working on a program to control my LEDs This could take weeks

Raffles are AWESOME!!!
GL on the Arduino.

Wow, I just spent an hour or two messing with the arduino and have a basic working program to fade in the blue and then the white in about an hour each, wait 10 hours and then fade out in the reverse order. Still a *very* long way from all the things I want to do but these things are pretty fun and it's so much less frustrating than the couple times I've tried to mess with PIC microcontrollers.

So I guess this means if I can get up early tomorrow and cut a couple holes in my light enclosure before the lights come on to install it I can have my first day of reef controller action

Here's the code if anybody wants to see or use it.

this is the pico of my dreams.....




please, please keep this thang goin'.....

p.s. i LOVE the new scape, it jawesome!

Things are working on the first try, this is freaking me out...

@pismo
Thanks! I'm hoping to keep this up for quite a while, the plan is to only add tiny frags and then give them time to do their thing LMK if you want a pico cube or whatever, I've got a shop and spare time and not enough corals

For the first time since the pico's inception I did a full clearing and cleaning and have staged a picture to show what my desk looks like in theory 99.9% of the time I have to move something to set down my coffee but here it is:



Basically what happened was my cat and I had one of those moments where our vastly different customs collided a bit last night; he thanked me for a couple chinese takeout prawns by busting inside a half hour later and presenting me with something he thought I would want to eat right on my desk in front of his door. But I did not want it and after that I wanted to clean a little bit

In other news coralline is starting to form in a couple spots on the cement rock so I took a quarter-sized piece of rock that had a super thick coating of coralline and scraped off as much as I could while the HOB pump was unplugged, then just ran the powerhead for a couple hours until there was no trace of suspended particles left in the water. We'll see what happens with that.

I got the arduino and LCD all packed into the light last night and here's a pic from today during sunrise:



The clock and temperature are fake for now but I have the sunrise/sunset is working and it displays the LED dimming value from 0-99. In the software the dimming is actually between 0 and 255, and I did some testing last night and the blues are useful as moonlights from 1/255 to around 8-10/255, and the whites are probably a good "full moon" effect at 1/255. I have a couple ideas to get better resolution at low light values with the blues and the whites though since one of the things I really want to have is seamless dimming from noon at the equator down to new moon.

The effect of the sunrise is incredible, after it gets above the very low moonlight levels the "jumps" are undetectable and you don't see anything happening even if you are looking for it, just when you look away and do something else for 10-15 minutes and then look back it has gotten brighter. Screw patents, I think everybody should be able to have this