Day 6/7, Rat taming by moonlight

The 3d printer worked a bit of overtime during the week, and churned out about 30 different wire management clips and brackets for me.  The new Apex was all wired in, but as is the case with such things, just running wires every which way ends up making a lovely nest for a rodent.

Brackets in hand, I went about tidying up the left side of the tank.  The right side needs alot more love actually, but I still have work to do over there, so I'll leave it for now.

For the curious, the brackets are off thingiverse, (not my designs):
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:122600
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1543201

Having sorted that mess out, I moved on to the dreaded lights.  The lights suffered some serious setbacks between the flood, and the dust ruining the fans.  My original build is actually documented on another aquarium site, but as I rework it, I will continue to document it here. Taking inventory of what I have, it looks like 3 of the 4 main lights have blown LED's, though it's often hard to tell just by looking.  I have ordered some new chips, so those are on the way.  In the meantime, the moonlights looked more or less OK, so I thought, well, lets find out.

So I very carefully checked all the connections.  Turns out the VDM cable I made is full of corrosion.  Ok, well, we can make a new one.  Looking at the old Tunze stream cable, one side is completely corroded, but the other wire looks as good as new.  The RJ45 end is done for though.  Snip, snip, crimp, and I now have an RJ45 -> Tunze Stream and 2 fork connects.  Fork connects hook up to the ballast, Tunze plugs into the little box, and we are off to the races. I carefully verify which VDM outlet is attached to which wire, edit the programing for that VDM to be "Set 15".  Just enough to power it up, but not enough to run them at full blast.  Plug in the wire, flip the outlet on and...

Woo.  I can has moonlight!  This is good.  This saves me so much work not having to reinvent this particular wheel.  The moonlighting was by far the more complex of the two lighting setups, so to be able to just plug it in and go is such a win.   More on that later...

So now that the Tunze's have VDM outlets wired into them, they need some programming, and a bit of love on the wire management side as well.  First, I made a pair of these:

Then I did some simple programming in the Apex for the streams, and got a decent setup going:

A few minutes of testing, and I was very pleased with the result.  Neither side turns off fully, which is good for my size of tank.  Mind you, filling out the giant form on the Apex to do this, and get them right, well that took forever.  Basically I have them run for 45 minutes at full power, then a 45 minute slowdown, and a 45 minute low power (30%).  They are on alternating schedules, so they really move the water around in different ways.  I've probably fiddled alot with the placement of them, but I'm still not 100% pleased with it yet. Time will tell.

One last (HA!) bracket needed to be designed, so back into Tinkercad I went, and spat out this bracket:

Now my probe wires are all nice and tidy.  One thing to note about these.  The Trigger system Ruby sumps come with some very nice premade probe holders.  I was pretty excited about these, and was looking forward to ditching my magnet mounts.  No luck.  They are awful.  They are too low in the sump, so the tops of the probes were underwater.  They don't have little screws, so the probes just kinda dangle in the holes and move around, and finally, they are in the area reserved for the skimmer.  Between the drains and the skimmer, that area is full of bubbles, and this was ruining the readings on all the probes! Nope, back to the magnets for me.

Ok, Tunzes taken care of.  Check.  Moonlights work, check. Wires managed.. mostly check.  Time to do some programming..