Aquacontroller or Reefkeeper?

I have been looking at getting either an aquacontroller jr or a reefkeeper2. It seems that they are both very good products with pros and cons to each. What is everyone using out there? Any comments?

 

There very simular. I own the ACjr. with a DC8. Like I said those two models are very close to one and another but the product line from neptune is much larger. You can buy more add-ons for the neptune products. Like software, dimmers, moonlight controllers, alarms and their available from a number of dealers.

There both good product and really worth while once the system get complicated enough.

 

my vote's for the digital aquatics reefkeeper...the reefkeeper 2 to be exact. it just looks cleaner and you can't go wrong with a blue LCD display...

Digital Aquatics 2006

 

I ordered an AC jr with the HD plug ins because of my chiller. Looking forward to getting it set up.
Scott

 

Aquatronica ;D

 

hum....that always a possibility i guess. ...if I sell my car!!

 

How about this?

I will probobly use something like this: eBay: Christmas light tree timer with 8 outlets auto on off (item 140060818854 end time Dec-10-06 16:51:50 PST)

 

I just got my Reefkeeper 2 in the mail today. I was tired crappy heaters that i had no idea what temp they were going to heat to. combined with temerature probes that seemed scarily inaccurate. I wish there were better ways to manage all the automation a tank needs. I just kept feeling like I wasent able to stablize my tank. hopefully now i will dive into more precious creatures.

 

Mother of all Aquatic Controllers

I keep looking at these things and thinking to myself:
"You know, there are those $100 VIA Single Board Celeron PCs that consume 1W (yes, one WATT) when idling, and come with the hookups for capacitive (the soft membrane type that sense pressure - so wet fingers, pens, etc, all work) touch displays."

I just keep thinking that it would be fun to take one of those, put a metal frame on it with some silicone and an outer plastic sleeve to prevent water intrusion, hook it up to an SD drive, (for an OS/data drive) and put an embedded linux distro on it. Done right, the main body, complete with color LCD touch display would cost less than $300. Since it's a real PC, of course, it could run Apache, even Java/JBoss. I'd make it completely remotely accessable via wired (or wireless) network, or via the touch screen display. No moving parts (including fans) so no noise. No hard disk, so no air nessisary in the production model, so I can dip the motherboard in Epoxy after changing the SD to a flash chip, and just leave the heat sink for the CPU dangling out the back. Could probably do that around the display too, so you could even drop the thing in a bucket of salt water and leave it there with no ill effect. (it would cool the CPU nicely too)

I was even toying with how fun it would be to integrate web camera support (after all, Linux has it) so people could keep an eye on their fishies, or share them with the world.8) Was imagining the possibilities for those "spy" cameras, and how to integrate them into nitrogen filled glass bubbles with micromotors.

Power switching, and even dimming can easily be done via extension power strips with Triacs under digital control, controlled via USB (to make expansion easy), or relays for on/off only applications. For no mistake plugins, whenever someone is connecting a new device, you put a combination button/light for each outlet, so you can just push the button to tell the computer "I'm putting this new device HERE". The computer then blinks it back to tell you that it got the message.

I was also having fun thinking about hypergraphs (x dimensional graphs) to chart the effects of some action, so the computer could make more educated decisions about what to do based on past experience with the devices, and when to shut a device off in advance of actually reaching a target, so it doesn't play "flip flop" when a particular change takes an hour or two before the results start showing. That would also play into failure detection/alerting, where the computer could warn of a condition that was changing too rapidly for it to correct, even before it became dangerous to the tank inhabitants, or too rapidly/erratically to be anything except a sensor or component failure.

I also started thinking about strange concepts like tide tank controlling (and how to engineer them mechanically so component failures don't result in anything bad) and moon phase + sun and moon position controlling, but that's where the mechanical portion of it started getting way too complicated. I had been going so far as how to do chemical tests using an electronicly controlled pipette with a 3d mechanical auctuator + a cheap spectrum analyzer, and automated water changing mechanics that relied on the sump having an overflow that went to a drain, (again, to avoid accidents) but then I realized I was taking virtually ALL the maintenance out of the system, where's the fun in that, and hot jeesus this is getting expensive isn't it? :

Any takers? I know how to build this thing, just need $5-10k in development and materials costs. (Half joking... if someone put up $10k, I wouldn't be, but I doubt that's gonna happen, so I'm joking mostly)

That's what happens when you show me something shiny... I want to build something shinier, especially if I have the expertise to actually do it.

 

Aquatronica is about 90% of what I had in mind... Oh well, probably not worth reinventing the wheel for that extra 10%. Maybe I can convince them to make the remaining modules I wanted to add to my idea?