plantarms Posted October 27, 2009 Share Posted October 27, 2009 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 Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted October 27, 2009 Author Share Posted October 27, 2009 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. Link to comment
badfish816 Posted October 27, 2009 Share Posted October 27, 2009 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. Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted October 27, 2009 Author Share Posted October 27, 2009 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 Link to comment
evilc66 Posted October 27, 2009 Share Posted October 27, 2009 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. Link to comment
plantarms Posted October 28, 2009 Share Posted October 28, 2009 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. Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted October 29, 2009 Author Share Posted October 29, 2009 "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 Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted October 30, 2009 Author Share Posted October 30, 2009 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 Link to comment
plantarms Posted November 3, 2009 Share Posted November 3, 2009 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? Link to comment
pschmitz Posted November 17, 2009 Share Posted November 17, 2009 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 Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted November 18, 2009 Author Share Posted November 18, 2009 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 Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted December 6, 2009 Author Share Posted December 6, 2009 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 Link to comment
badfish816 Posted December 6, 2009 Share Posted December 6, 2009 loks nice man. sweet pick up too. Link to comment
evilc66 Posted December 7, 2009 Share Posted December 7, 2009 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: Yes. Yes they do Link to comment
Weetabix7 Posted December 8, 2009 Share Posted December 8, 2009 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. Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted December 8, 2009 Author Share Posted December 8, 2009 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. Link to comment
Weetabix7 Posted December 9, 2009 Share Posted December 9, 2009 How high off the water do you have the light right now? Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted December 9, 2009 Author Share Posted December 9, 2009 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. Link to comment
badfish816 Posted December 9, 2009 Share Posted December 9, 2009 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!!! Link to comment
mnvikes8484 Posted December 9, 2009 Share Posted December 9, 2009 howd you do your rock? just a mold a mix of aragonite and portland cement? Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted December 9, 2009 Author Share Posted December 9, 2009 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. Link to comment
badfish816 Posted December 9, 2009 Share Posted December 9, 2009 dang that growth is insane! Link to comment
2YearOldElegance Posted December 17, 2009 Share Posted December 17, 2009 what's the stringy stuff coming off the rock? All these frags are awesome btw! Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted December 17, 2009 Author Share Posted December 17, 2009 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. Link to comment
cptbjorn Posted December 18, 2009 Author Share Posted December 18, 2009 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 Link to comment
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.