cptbjorn's 3g Cube Pico

[SmileyFace1995]

hows this coming along

 

[boatswainmate]

I'm wondering what it would cost me to set up a light like that for my 75g sea clear .. that's a great little light that your working on cant wait to see the wright up

 

[SmileyFace1995]

probably quiet a bit, but in long run they say its worth it cuz led's last up to 10years n u can program them all hella crazy,

 

[ReefMadness]

led is the only way to go. expensive at first but then really pay off

 

[cptbjorn]

I just picked up some frags from the frag swap and figured since I learned about it here I'd come do an update. I didn't think it had been this long since I'd posted here, I've added a couple things since my last post. Such as 6 acans, 5 chalices, 4 acros, 10 various montis, a couple more various sps and softy frags, a baby maxima and 3 sexy shrimp lol. Probably some other stuff too. Oh yeah and a pico vortech style pump I cooked up and a DIY 3-sensor optical ATO

I'm new at this and straight up cooked some of my sps, let some brown out and have had some accidents with stinging and some stuff just doesn't seem to like me/the LEDs. But nothing dead yet







And a FTS. Yep, that really is a magnetic frag disc on the side that supports two additional frags on top of it. Space has been an issue

 

[sampets1984]

I like how you basically made your own lil nano tank with just a few pieces of glass. Very nice

 

[moto826]

thats a cool tank how you make the pico vortec looks cool

 

[str8juizy]

Wow... beautiful tank! Makes me want to set one up for work!

 

[ReefMadness]

what are u feeding? how do u keep the algae away

 

[cptbjorn]

Thanks

The pico vortech dry side is a brushless motor cooled by a small cooling fan spinning a diametrically aligned neodymium ring magnet, and the wet side is another of the same magnet spinning a 31mm model boat propeller through a rulon bearing. The magnets couple surprisingly well and I'm running them 1/2" apart and don't come apart even if I start the motor at 20v from a cold start (I normally run it from 2-10v and 20v turns the tank into a coral and sand mosh pit and gets water all over my desk within seconds, 800+ gph easily.) I had to machine about a dozen different parts out of teflon, PVC and 316 stainless to make it all pretty and SW safe and a friend of mine did just as much work designing and programming the controller for it. It was fun but now I realize how cheap MP10s are lol.


I'm feeding oyster feast, phyto and mysis every day or two and dosing Seachem Fuel and Brightwell CoralAmino in my ATO water. Occasionally I do small chunks of scallops instead of mysis. Also once a week before my water change I soak cubes of BBS, cyclopeeze and ON prime reef in selcon and feed the whole mess to the tank with the pumps turned off for about 30 minutes, then turn the pumps back on until the water clears and do the WC. Everything seems to love it.

I think it works because I rinse the mysis really well and I have chaeto growing under a high power cree LED 24/7 and it just outcompetes everything else; I have been weighing the chaeto ball and it more than triples every week and keeps the nitrates and phosphates at undetectable levels. I run half of a small unit of chemi-pure elite to help with phosphates as well.

 

[ReefMadness]

well, it is definately a sweet looking tank. one more question.... how much water do u change out and how often?

 

[cptbjorn]

I try to do a 1g change (~40% of actual water volume) every week but it looks fine up to 2 weeks. I bet I could get away with smaller changes or longer intervals at this point but I don't plan to find out, 1 gallon is easy enough

It does require two part dosing every day though, with the current alkalinity consumption it drops ~2.25 dKH per day if I don't keep up with it and I can tell immediately by looking at the SPS if I forgot the previous day. I'm working on adding some dosing pumps to the arduino controller to keep it more constant.

 

[user 2204]

Very cool little tank. Love them picos and nanos. Can't wait to see the write up on the lighting.

Do you use the USB version of the board for the lighting? And it looks like you're using 2 boards?

Cheers,
Alex

 

[cptbjorn]

I didn't have room to do an arduino with a bunch of shield boards so the arduino board I'm using is a custom design, it is electrically equivalent to the standard duemilanove boards except I added a real time clock and a 512kb EEPROM and shrunk the board size by about 20%. I haven't used the EEPROM yet but I hope to use it to log my temperature, ATO consumption etc and I could also store moon cycle/season/tidal data in there so my lighting and powerhead cycles can change with the moon and seasons.

The second board is my LED drivers, none of the off the shelf drivers I could find had the dimming performance I was looking for since I wanted to dim my main array down far enough to use as moonlights. I built some based on National's LM3404 and they work great, the blues never turn off all the way they just slowly dim down to a minimum setting at night.

 

[user 2204]

That is sweet. Another question though. Are you concerened about the boards or should I say the pins on the boards getting rusted over time due to the salt spray and the such?

I know from experience how salt spray gets over everything over time. *lol*

 

[cptbjorn]

I added legs to the fixture since I took the first pictures so the LEDs are about 2" off the water now and the boards are protected by acrylic so it shouldn't be a problem. The light even fell into the water too (twice ) before I got the legs to hold it in place and everything was fine since I unplugged it and rinsed everything with RO immediately.

When I was first testing though and had it just on a timer and the LEDs and fans both cut off abruptly at night there was some wicked condensation which would probably have caused problems pretty quickly. I just run the fans 24/7 so this can't happen now.

 

[iroll253]

That light is sweet. Props for a nice build

 

[ReefMadness]

did i see ur tank on nano-reef perhaps?

 

[SmileyFace1995]

wow! props on the tank!
i don't know exactly what your talking about at all with the lights im stoked for that right up!

and how much did this setup cost?

 

[Skimmy]

dude...
sweet pico!!!
you made the rock, and the LED light...
quite impressive!!

even with my ghetto rigged chinese LED fixtures on my nano, I'll never go back to M.H. or T5's again.