Cptbjorn's 3g DIY Pico Cube

[sammy113]

wow that temp probe and heater are awesome! Very impressive! you should start selling this micro heater to all those Pico reefers. Bet thats 75 times smaller than the smallest heater in the market

[reef2.5]

ill take one of each please

[cptbjorn]

I prepared a titanium tube and turned some acetal end caps, soldered 3 220 ohm 5 watt power resistors in series and attached some 22 gauge teflon coax, covered all the connections in a layer of teflon tube, then a layer of high temp heat shrink. Then I dipped and baked on two layers of polyester potting resin, put the resistors in the titanium tube and filled it as best I could with JB weld loaded in a blunt syringe, leaving space at the ends to seal the end caps on with a good layer of silicone sealant.

 

Unless you have all those things sitting around and are confident you can seal it well enough to trust it submerged in saltwater with your $$$ livestock it is a much better idea to buy a heater though, the jalli/finnex 50w titanium heaters are almost as small and work very well. I made the heater more for fun and to see if I could do it than for cost/performance reasons and it can be very dangerous if you do it incorrectly.

 

I can't sell them for similar reasons, I can just see myself getting sued to bejeezus and back if something bad happens

[reef2.5]

I prepared a titanium tube and turned some acetal end caps, soldered 3 220 ohm 5 watt power resistors in series and attached some 22 gauge teflon coax, covered all the connections in a layer of teflon tube, then a layer of high temp heat shrink. Then I dipped and baked on two layers of polyester potting resin, put the resistors in the titanium tube and filled it as best I could with JB weld loaded in a blunt syringe, leaving space at the ends to seal the end caps on with a good layer of silicone sealant.

 

Unless you have all those things sitting around and are confident you can seal it well enough to trust it submerged in saltwater with your $$$ livestock it is a much better idea to buy a heater though, the jalli/finnex 50w titanium heaters are almost as small and work very well. I made the heater more for fun and to see if I could do it than for cost/performance reasons and it can be very dangerous if you do it incorrectly.

 

I can't sell them for similar reasons, I can just see myself getting sued to bejeezus and back if something bad happens

dang thats pretty freakin sweet man, are you worried about yours at all? any tests? hows it perform?

 

the tank i need to heat i only have 3"x2"x2" to be shared with the pump. basically what im saying is wow thats very nice. to bad for me ill keep searching.

[cptbjorn]

Nah I'm not really worried about it, I'm going to test it pretty well before putting it in a tank and the only thing I can see going wrong is maybe an air bubble between the JB weld and silicone getting hot and expanding and blowing an end cap off. It should still be sealed even if that happens too.

 

You could do some heat tape or something underneath a tank that size to keep it warm. Are you doing a closed loop with an aqualifter or something? I think that would be cool, I'd fill it with acans probably

[reef2.5]

Nah I'm not really worried about it, I'm going to test it pretty well before putting it in a tank and the only thing I can see going wrong is maybe an air bubble between the JB weld and silicone getting hot and expanding and blowing an end cap off. It should still be sealed even if that happens too.

 

You could do some heat tape or something underneath a tank that size to keep it warm. Are you doing a closed loop with an aqualifter or something? I think that would be cool, I'd fill it with acans probably

ive seen the heat tape thats my fall back when i finally give up on making one i just dont know enough about electronics and the more i find out the more dangerous it sounds.

 

i built a 1/4 gallon AIO system. i also tought myself to solder and built my first led light system two blue and two white. i really want to try and stock it with tiny SPS frags.

[cptbjorn]

That little tank is slick, from pico it seems you have skipped past femto/atto etc and gone straight for the planck scale Just be careful with those LEDs, that second pic looks like a SPS bleaching machine to me with the LEDs on full blast like that.

 

I'm trying a new method to feed the clam now, the tank was getting some strong(ish) natural sunlight late this morning (pretty freaky for early February around here but I'll take it) and the clam was nice and open+happy so of course I grabbed it with my tweezers. I put it in a 4oz container clipped to the side with 1.5ml of DT's phyto and I'm pretty sure it is eating it, it is mostly open and slowly opening and closing slightly. Before when I just tried putting it on my desk in a container to feed it didn't open much at all and put it back before it appeared to eat anything because the temp of the container was dropping too much.

 

Here's a pic, the hermit carefully climbed the silicone to check it out:

 

[cptbjorn]

Well I was first in line at the Barrier Reef midnight madness sale today

 

And I bought mysis and a bottle of oyster feast lol.

 

My sister and her fiance grabbed a mini colony of ATL appleberry monti though that I'm helping myself to a healthy frag of though, it appears to be a slightly different morph than the still browned out piece I got from fragglereef in December. Smaller bumps (corallites?) on this one and more branching/scrolling going on I think. They also got a purple haze monti frag that was two chunks glued to a plug and one of them is mine apparently

 

Also I met amnesiak there and scored 4 ricordea from the group buy; there's two blues, a green and a wicked orange one and they still have a lot of coloring+opening up to do. I thought I'd put them in my 13g but at least the orange one is going to have to be in my pico.

[cptbjorn]

I finally did some work on my arduino and it now polls the real time clock every second and updates the LCD and runs the light cycle. Until now I had to plug in my light at noon (or modify the program) and the "clock" was only right once per day, now it will be a lot easier to work on the light because I can just unplug it whenever and it knows what to do when it gets power back. I set the RTC in October I think and it only lost ~8 seconds since then so I won't have to worry about the photoperiod shifting anymore.

 

Also it will be simple to add my temp probe and heater and everything else, I'll post a link to the program in a couple days once some quirks are worked out and I annotate it a bit. Basically I just made a one second long function that updates the LCD and will later have the temp sensor and heater control in it and I'm using that instead of delay. I've been putting it off for a long time but when I got down to doing it it turned out to not be that hard, these arduinos are great for noobs like me

 

I still haven't used even 1/4 of the arduino's memory too so there is plenty of room left to play with Here's a pic, I'll probably get rid of the seconds on the clock once I'm done testing.

 

[nelsonpharmd]

Awesome!!! And..just in time since the set-up you built for me arrives today (can't wait to get home from work). I look forward to following your progress on this.....

[reef2.5]

I prepared a titanium tube and turned some acetal end caps, soldered 3 220 ohm 5 watt power resistors in series and attached some 22 gauge teflon coax, covered all the connections in a layer of teflon tube, then a layer of high temp heat shrink. Then I dipped and baked on two layers of polyester potting resin, put the resistors in the titanium tube and filled it as best I could with JB weld loaded in a blunt syringe, leaving space at the ends to seal the end caps on with a good layer of silicone sealant.

 

Unless you have all those things sitting around and are confident you can seal it well enough to trust it submerged in saltwater with your $$$ livestock it is a much better idea to buy a heater though, the jalli/finnex 50w titanium heaters are almost as small and work very well. I made the heater more for fun and to see if I could do it than for cost/performance reasons and it can be very dangerous if you do it incorrectly.

 

I can't sell them for similar reasons, I can just see myself getting sued to bejeezus and back if something bad happens

So if its not to much to ask for could you give me a more detailed parts list I think I might give it ago and I will asume all liabiltys.

[badfish816]

pretty slick. glad the kinks are getting taken care of.

[pismo_reefer]

*this pico is incredible!

 

 

 

wha? whosaydat?

[cptbjorn]

Wait you really heard that?

 

There's a hypnotoad that just started a pico on here so I'm working on a mind control routine for my arduino to combat it's powers

[amnesiak]

[cptbjorn]

lol

 

Yeah I'm starting to have mixed feelings about my sexy shrimp and they are probably going to be removed to a barren water+air stone tank for breeding purposes. Honestly they can munch on zoas/softies all day with the way they are growing but I'm almost positive they are nibbling on some of the montis and the birdsnest.

 

They greedily snatch pellets right out of the tweezers but then insist on eating them spiderman style on the underside of the arch and lose the pellet to the flow within a minute or two

 

It is hilarious when they flail their legs at the pellet as it drifts away though. onoz dey stealin mah pelits! abrakadabras! iz gone ;_;

[badfish816]

that's funny

[fiction101]

lol

 

Yeah I'm starting to have mixed feelings about my sexy shrimp and they are probably going to be removed to a barren water+air stone tank for breeding purposes. Honestly they can munch on zoas/softies all day with the way they are growing but I'm almost positive they are nibbling on some of the montis and the birdsnest.

 

They greedily snatch pellets right out of the tweezers but then insist on eating them spiderman style on the underside of the arch and lose the pellet to the flow within a minute or two

 

It is hilarious when they flail their legs at the pellet as it drifts away though. onoz dey stealin mah pelits! abrakadabras! iz gone ;_;

 

I had one eat the bottom of my green birdsnest; those little bastards should never be placed next to corals!

[cptbjorn]

The tank has been looking/acting weird the last couple weeks and I've been doing some big waterchanges and things only started to look better for a couple days after a 1g/33% change. Yesterday I split up a small bag of chemi-pure elite and I'm running half in my HOB fuge intake chamber, and even after 24 hours I think I'm seeing a difference. First thing I noticed was today my acans are WAY out there and the rest of the LPS is looking better than ever:

 

 

Most of the soft corals don't really seem to care what the water is like and I don't think the SPS have had a chance to respond yet but I think the chemi pure might be removing something bad from the water.

 

... and now I have the gears in my head turning on a pico carbon+gfo reactor when I have other things to work on

[cptbjorn]

Alright so yesterday I turned off my HOB filter to feed the tank which exposes about 2" of the heater from the water drop in the fuge. It has worked fine after doing this many times before but this time the heater stopped heating, I noticed several hours later that the "heater on" light wasn't turning off. Tank only got down to 74 or so, luckily it didn't go all night that way because my ambient temp is about 60 right now.

 

I slowly got it back up to temp with a different heater and all the livestock seemed to not even notice. Then today I opened up the thermostat/controller part of the broken heater and was able to figure out how it worked and spliced in my DIY titanium heater and it works great

 

The old heating element had a 10k NTC thermistor potted inside and I had some extras so I wired up a separate temp sensor and it seems to be extremely stable, I'm plotting the temps now. It seems like the diy heater is a success

[reef2.5]

Alright so yesterday I turned off my HOB filter to feed the tank which exposes about 2" of the heater from the water drop in the fuge. It has worked fine after doing this many times before but this time the heater stopped heating, I noticed several hours later that the "heater on" light wasn't turning off. Tank only got down to 74 or so, luckily it didn't go all night that way because my ambient temp is about 60 right now.

 

I slowly got it back up to temp with a different heater and all the livestock seemed to not even notice. Then today I opened up the thermostat/controller part of the broken heater and was able to figure out how it worked and spliced in my DIY titanium heater and it works great

 

The old heating element had a 10k NTC thermistor potted inside and I had some extras so I wired up a separate temp sensor and it seems to be extremely stable, I'm plotting the temps now. It seems like the diy heater is a success

Very nice I can't wait tell those heaters hit the market

[cptbjorn]

Oh yeah I totally forgot about you asking about the heater, for your tiny tank I'd just a single 5w resistor and run it off of a lower voltage DC instead of AC wall voltage. This 5w resistor would put out a little over 4w of heat with 12v across it and it is a "radial" package which means both leads come out of one end. You could basically just hook up wires to it, heat shrink over those connections, smother the whole thing in silicone and put another piece of heat shrink over the top and heat that up and it should be sufficiently encapsulated.

 

After that you would need a thermostat, check out this page for some good workable options. They are pretty much the same circuit as the controller I'm using on my heater.

 

edit: the low voltage DC protects you from getting shocked but it is still critical that it is completely sealed. DC voltage across two copper+lead+tin+etc electrodes exposed to the SW will nuke your tank with the quickness.

[amnesiak]

With the radial option you could put the whole thing in a glass test tube with silicone. Think that would work c?

[cptbjorn]

That sounds legit, I say do that.

 

From my limited experience in encapsulating for submerged stuff I would say put a drinking straw over the end of the caulking gun and use that to fill up the bottom half of the test tube with silicone and then put in the resistor so the air has somewhere to go. If you just try to cover the resistor in silicone and put it in the test tube it will form a seal with an air bubble in the bottom and after that it all goes downhill. I ruined a perfectly good temp sensor that way.

 

Also I tried and it is impossible to convey that ^ information without 1200 innuendos.

[reef2.5]

Oh yeah I totally forgot about you asking about the heater, for your tiny tank I'd just a single 5w resistor and run it off of a lower voltage DC instead of AC wall voltage. This 5w resistor would put out a little over 4w of heat with 12v across it and it is a "radial" package which means both leads come out of one end. You could basically just hook up wires to it, heat shrink over those connections, smother the whole thing in silicone and put another piece of heat shrink over the top and heat that up and it should be sufficiently encapsulated.

so you mean hook the power wires directly to the resistor

 

After that you would need a thermostat, check out this page for some good workable options. They are pretty much the same circuit as the controller I'm using on my heater.

so ive seen this page before is this something i could print out and go to radio shack for the parts. cause i have no idea how to read that

 

edit: the low voltage DC protects you from getting shocked but it is still critical that it is completely sealed. DC voltage across two copper+lead+tin+etc electrodes exposed to the SW will nuke your tank with the quickness.

so you mean hook the power wires directly to the resistor

 

so ive seen this page before is this something i could print out and go to radio shack for the parts. cause i have no idea how to read that