I’ve been looking to get a controller setup on my tank for quite some time. I’ve been going back and forth between the ReefKeeper II and the Aquacontroller Jr. Of course both have their pros and cons, but when Kyle managed to score an aquacontroller jr from one of his buddies … I knew it was meant to be.
I got the unit plugged in, put the probes in place, and spent the next 5 hours trying to figure out which outlet went with which output. Seemed like it should have been fairly straight forward … I figured I’m a college graduate with an engineering degree … how hard can this be?! Famous last words … It literally took me 5 hours to figure out which outlet was which. I searched documentation, blogs, phorums, you name it … yet in the end I was able to figure it all out via basic deduction.
The real trick to this whole setup was making it wireless. Those familiar with the aquacontroller jr know that it has an old school RS-232 port (aka: serial) but not a bonafied ethernet connection like it’s big brother the aquacontroller III (which I believe Kyle has?). After carefully reading all of the direction manuals that came with it (and still not being able to make it work) I stumbled onto the following blog with some great advice on making the connection:
Just in case that link doesn’t work, here are my setup notes for each component…
Iogear bluetooth 2.0 USB Micro Adapter
Iogear GBU421mini bluetooth usb adapter.
- Plug in adapter to a dedicated usb port
- the windows new hardware wizard should come up and take care of installing all the drivers necessary. However, if it doesn’t or you need to manually download the drivers download the driver/utility from here
- Use the default password “1234″ as specified in the documentation to initialize
- When the Windows Bluetooth utility comes up, set the services you want to use for this device (in my case I just used the serial port).
Iogear serial Adapter with Bluetooth wireless technology
Iogear GBS301 Serial Adapter with Bluetooth wireless technology – the second half of the equation
- I hooked the Iogear serial adapter up to the ACjr and powered it up (see below). Very important you do it in this order. Make sure you set the baud rate to 9600 (1st three switches up) and set it to slave mode (4rth switch down)
- Go back to your computer, click the “My Bluetooth Places” icon on your desktop to launch the bluetooth utility. Then use the “search for devices in range” link on the left navigation to search for the acjr adapter.
- When the serial adapter is detected, right click it and choose “pair device”.
- Hopefully that’s it, you’re connected! Please note: Once setup, you’ll see a notification telling you what port your hardward is using … mine was COM4, which seems to be common. Take note of this, you’ll need to tell Aquanotes what port to use when communicating to your acjr
- With this done, it is communicating to the computer and ready for Aquanotes! If you missed the notification on what port your hardware is using, you can find out by doing the following:
- Click the “My Bluetooth Places” icon on your desktop
- Double click the “IOGEAR GBS301 200F” icon
- Right click the “SPP Slave on IOGear on GBS301200F”
- This blog will get you setup as far as establishing baud rate, initial master/slave relationships, etc … but what it doesn’t tell you is that you need to initialize your Aquanotes software with the serial number from your device in order to sync them up. Read up on the details here:
http://www.neptunesys.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=38&Itemid=39
Once I did this, I was able luanch aqua notes click “status”->”reeftank” and get the up to date information!
check out the ACSerial2Web program to enable web access to AC jr.
thanks.
Great post,I followed your instruction but no luck for me. if I do a direct connection using serial cable directly to my PC works fine, but when I hooked up my iogear bluetooth ,my computer see it and Im able to connect but no connection from my AC jr,tried aqua notes and ac2web work fine using direct connection, tried different class 1 usb bluetooth still no luck,The only thing I can think of is the serial cable,I got it somewhere.Are you using the serial cable from Neptune? or where did you get your cable.Thanks!
kripas – I stopped using this setup about year ago, got tired of not being able to get full access from the web and picked up APEX Lite to replace it. However, if I remember correctly, I had problems like you are mentioning. I was able to resolve them (if I remember correctly), by power cycling the GBS301 (just unplug and plug back in). Make sure you are in range, maybe try setting the whole thing up at your desk so you don’t have to run back and forth to your tank a hundred times!
Wish I could be of more help, but like I said … I stopped using this setup about a year ago.