Coraltopia.com » Gadgets

Project “growth shot” in full effect!

Clinton — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 04:29:53 +0000

I’ve been playing with the idea of starting up a full blown page to post weekly growth shots to, and tonight I finally decided to sit down and make it happen!

The wife is out of the house on Monday nights, so I get some bonus fish tank time. I usually do a thorough glass cleaning, check my levels, do the dosing, take care of any other maintenance issues that need addressed. However, now that I have this fancy new iPhone it’s easier than ever to take weekly growth shots! You’ll see the link to the page up there in the navigation – other than that, not much to report for this week. Added some extra rubble to the tank to try and close up some of the dead space under the over hang. Still pondering tearing that all out and do a complete rebuild (always the case right?!) but for now I am going to let it sit and grow. I’ll be sure to post another update next, till then – happy reefing!

iPhone 4.0 = more pics and vids on the way!

Clinton — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:30:11 +0000

I’ve been on a Twitter frenzy lately, mostly becuase (as the concept might dictate) micro-blogging is quicker and easier than full blown blogging (follow us @coraltopia). However, there have been several updates in the past weeks so I thought I would take a chance to reflect and share with any people who are silly enough to still be reading …

As you may have heard, I just picked up my new iPhone 4.0. This thing is pretty much amazing, and I can’t wait to start taking more pics and vids to get get posted on the site. I’ve been doing some cleaning in the past couple weeks, including adding some extra sponges for some mechanical filtration and taking the old school razor blade to the glass (which I do every couple months regardless). I’m going to try to post an update weekly for a bit and see how it goes … Hoping to have some more active growth shots as well as some more video as I start to add more pieces to the collection. This weekend I’m hoping to grab a little hammer coral from a guy down in Redondo Beach, look for pics next episode!

Clinton’s Nanotuner 28g HQI fan upgrade

Clinton — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:21:35 +0000

Thought I would post some pics of my fan upgrade over the weekend. I noticed my fans weren’t cutting the mustard when I noticed the heatsink clicking the lights off after a little over 7hours. At first, I thought it might have been my controller doing the turnoff (I have quite a few ‘catch’ lines in there to prevent the heat from going overboard). However, the lights would *always* come back after about 3 minutes.

I bought the kit from http://www.nanotuners.com and followed the directional YouTube video listed on their site. The video was *pretty* good, but I did have to figure out a couple little details by myself. I also replaced ALL of the screws that hold the splash guard in place. Most of them were rusted badly, but some had actually broken off during previous bulb replacements and I had a suspicion that maybe (just maybe) some moisture was sneaking under the guard and effecting the bulb. Entire project took a little over an hour (but I took my sweet time and watched the Olympics while I worked)

Clinton gets a new skimmer!

Clinton — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 05:19:43 +0000

After a 3 month back order, my new Sapphire Aquatics skimmer finally came in today!! Rather than bore you with ALL the details – here is a link:

http://www.nanotuners.com/product_info.php?cPath=51&products_id=596

Installation was quick and painless. I added a bunch of pics to the gallery ( and a few randoms below) – check em out and tell me what you think!


View at Picasa Kind of fuzzy, but you can see on the left that the skimmer body won’t fit in the center compartment with doing a quick mod to remove a small plastic lip on the tank.	View at Picasa Top view after the skimmer is slid into position	View at Picasa Chords run, cup sitting nicely on top

Easter surf, frag racks, and 6 packs

Clinton — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 01:56:24 +0000

Shashin Error:

No photos found for specified shortcode

Aquacontroller Jr.

Clinton — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:42:29 +0000

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:

http://www.reefsanctuary.com/forums/equipment/29301-wireless-aquacontroller-jr-serial-connection.html

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!