So having gone with the AI Sols, I wanted to see how well they were lighting the tank. The goal was always to have darker areas and more well-lit areas, I didn't want to blast everything in the tank with bright light, I wanted something that looked a little more natural.

So I started looking around for PAR meters - there's a couple of DIY projects but nothing calibrated and "ready to go", so I caved and looked at the professional ones. Apogee's meters seem to be the normal...

Wow! was it really over a month ago that I last posted here!

Ok, well things have been happening, but just much more slowly than before. Before I started stocking the tank, I wanted to get a quarantine system up and running, and that took longer than I thought it would.

The plan was to use the garden shed as the location (since we're, ahem, space constrained) and I thought I'd set up another identical auto-water-change/topoff system as I have on the main tank, so that...

So I was ready to start talking a little about the reef-controller I've been working on for the last 9 months or so, and I sought some clarification from RC admins about whether I ought to post about it online.

Turns out that since there's a (small) possibility I might want to make this commercially available, the answer was "Don't do it", unless I'm certain I'm going to release it for free. Yeah, I know, there's a million-and-one reef controllers out there, where's the...

Things may appear to have been quiet on the Western front, or chez nous, anyway... Not really [grin].

The major work at the moment is going into the software driving the controller, and since I only want to announce that when it's finished, y'all are gonna have to wait... I'd say I'm getting closer now - it's maybe 60-70% done. Another couple of months would do it, if we weren't about to greet our first child! So probably now another 6 months out...

There's some more...

So, it may seem that there's been no activity on any front for quite a while now, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. I'm hard at work, hacking away on two main things:

[U][I]1) Lighting:[/I][/U]

The design is finished, and I've cut the aluminium to size for one test 'pod' to cover about 2' square, drilled the holes for each LED, tapped out the screw threads, and it's ready to assemble/wire. What's put this a bit on the back-burner was a teensy mistake...