180 gallon build: Modular control system, 3D printed equipment, open-source

[Reefers4U]

electric! good to note - please take note of this - I did not take note of this and was lucky - its outright dangerous to do this anywhere near an open flame in doors.

What acetone did you use because I felt like I couldn't get enough of a vapor going - I also tried doing this on the heated bed to no avail.

What is the suspension time in the vapor cloud?

[jrhupp]

Originally Posted by Reefers4U

electric! good to note - please take note of this - I did not take note of this and was lucky - its outright dangerous to do this anywhere near an open flame in doors.

What acetone did you use because I felt like I couldn't get enough of a vapor going - I also tried doing this on the heated bed to no avail.

What is the suspension time in the vapor cloud?

Yes, near an open flame seems quite dangerous.

For acetone, it is whatever the big box store sells in the 1 gallon jug. I don't remember if it was Lowe's or HD that I picked it up at. But it shouldn't matter.

As for how long in the vapor, it depends on the part. On the short end, 15 to 30 seconds. Generally this would be a small part that had been sanded and brushed. On the long end, a minute or so for a large part. And often for really large parts I will do multiple dips in the vapor for shorter periods. With large parts I find that the vapor will condense and drip on the bottom of the part before the top starts to polish if left too long. Multiple shorter dips into the vapor seem to help with this.

Acetone vapor is quite dense, but it is also easy to disperse with turbulence. So for getting a good vapor cloud, I find it pretty important to move slowly and keep the pot covered as much as possible. Otherwise I wind blowing most of the vapor out of the pot and the remaining cloud is not dense enough to get a good polish.

[jrhupp]

Update time:

I picked up some flexible filament to play around with; Cheetah (polyurethane) from NinjaTek. First project for it was to provide some noise dampening on the surge valves. They are not loud, but are audible none the less. My dosing pumps use the same stepper and driver at the same voltage and about the same step frequency and they are dead silent. So there is some room for improvement on the valves. At first pass I was thinking the big difference between the two is the way the stepper shaft is coupled to the rest of the device: on the dosing pumps there is soft silicone tubing between the shaft and the rest of the device, where as the valves use two hard gears. So there is plenty of opportunity for vibrations coming from the stepper shaft to be propagated through the rest of the valve. In an attempt to provide some vibration dampening on the gears, I modeled up a hybrid gear with a hard ABS hub and polyurethane teeth. The two parts snap fit together.

Here are the separate parts before assembly and installing on one of the valves:


Its been on about a week and a half now and I am just watching to see how it wears/holds up in the short term. Noise wise it provided some reduction, but not what I had hoped for. I suspect that is because the polyurethane is not as soft as I expected. I may try a softer filament on this hub, or try the whole gear printed in this polyurethane.

For other printer projects, I have been working on some enclosures and a board for the main controller. I don't have all the parts for the main controller board at the moment. So I will wait to post it until its a bit further along. But here is it in its enclosure and a new enclosure for the serial switch I put together a while back:


The original switch enclosure was just a clip to DIN mount the boards and left the traces exposed. As I have been adding to the control panel where all the DIN mounted stuff is, I decided I didn't like this. So it got a new enclosure that warps completely around it. Here it is assembled and installed:


The updated SketchUp file for the switch enclosure can be found here.

I also did some modifications to the brine feeder. I had been playing around with a magnet mount version of the feeder, but have not had much luck finding a low cost set of magnets that were strong enough to provide a good hold on my glass thickness. So that project is on hold for the moment. The other part I wanted to refine on the feeder is how the shrimp are added to it. I have been using a syringe to inject directly. This requires purging the air in the line and then injecting a few syringes of tank water to flush the brine down into the feeder. Which I don't mind, but the misses finds it a giant pain. So I modeled up a mostly enclosed funnel that sits just above the water line and has a connection for one of my return line siphon breaks. This way there is a small constant flow of water down through the feeder at all times and the brine can just be injected into the top of the funnel. I also added an overflow tube near the top of the funnel that directs any overflow directly into the tank. Here is the new brine feeder setup:


There are a few changes yet to be made on the funnel. Once those are done I will post a link to the file.

The final project for now is some DIY filter socks. Nothing too exciting or printed here. But I think still worth sharing. These are made from the pre-cut felt sheets from the craft store and nylon cord for a draw string. Here is one on one of the removable inlets to the rubble chamber:

[akmzero]

I love everything about this thread, main push for me to get my 3d printer, went with the maker select v2, love it. Just finishing making all the novelty things and getting that out of my system. Broke my paper towel holder yesterday, went to the basement and started printing one. I wanted to buy a tub drain on amazon but couldn't jstify the 12$, found one and printed it.

I'm getting to the point when I'm looking at things on/in my tank and saying "I should make a spare one of these for when this breaks"

About to start learning how to design stuff, honestly man, great work on everything. Good to see that a item like this can make such great products.

[anders maansson]

Greetings from Denmark.
I love your diy skills!
Can I get you to tell more about your surge tank and how it works, maybe with a vedeo? pretty please!

[shiftline]

I'm loving all the cool stuff your designing and printing. Thanks for posting all the files as well! I may borrow some of your ideas down the road


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[shiftline]

Originally Posted by naecO.rM

Great stuff!
Is that for a MP40QD or MP40wES?
Would you share your 3D file , please.

Sorry for being far to late not the reply. It's the mp40. I'll see if I can dig up the stl tomorrow


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[naecO.rM]

Originally Posted by shiftline

Sorry for being far to late not the reply. It's the mp40. I'll see if I can dig up the stl tomorrow


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Thank you!

[Assasi]

Is that motorized pvc valve available somewhere?

[jrhupp]

Originally Posted by akmzero

I love everything about this thread, main push for me to get my 3d printer, went with the maker select v2, love it. Just finishing making all the novelty things and getting that out of my system. Broke my paper towel holder yesterday, went to the basement and started printing one. I wanted to buy a tub drain on amazon but couldn't jstify the 12$, found one and printed it.

I'm getting to the point when I'm looking at things on/in my tank and saying "I should make a spare one of these for when this breaks"

About to start learning how to design stuff, honestly man, great work on everything. Good to see that a item like this can make such great products.

Sorry for the delayed response. Most excellent that another printer is joining the fray!

Originally Posted by anders maansson

Greetings from Denmark.
I love your diy skills!
Can I get you to tell more about your surge tank and how it works, maybe with a vedeo? pretty please!

Thanks. There is a video several pages back that shows it a bit. But I am do to update it. I just have not gotten around to it.

Originally Posted by shiftline

I'm loving all the cool stuff your designing and printing. Thanks for posting all the files as well! I may borrow some of your ideas down the road

Thanks. Please do.

Originally Posted by Assasi

Is that motorized pvc valve available somewhere?

All the source files are linked in the thread. Just a matter of printing it out and assembling it.

[PilotMaximus]

Following. Just amazing and inspirational. Making my 3D printer choice and getting it on its way as well.

[akmzero]

You said you had a update for the brine shrimp feeder?

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[vega77]

Originally Posted by jrhupp

I have the dosing module working and installed (mostly anyway). As soon as I do some clean up in the Sketch I will post it. Hardware wise I still need to add the battery for the RTC and pick up another NEMA-17 motor for the other pump.

The Sketch supports dosing three times a day; timing is independent between pumps and volume is independent per dose event. The way it is written it would not be terribly difficult to increase the number of possible events. For me though I think three is good enough for the time being.

[/IMG]

Hi

Amazing build.
What kind of stepper motors are you using for the dosing pumps ?
Pancake nema17 ?

[jrhupp]

Have been slow to check in on things and get updates posted. Most free time lately has been going full tilt to getting a beta version of the controller embedded/web UI done. Unfortunately this is still a ways out.

Originally Posted by PilotMaximus

Following. Just amazing and inspirational. Making my 3D printer choice and getting it on its way as well.

Thanks. Glad I can inspire others to do similar.

Originally Posted by akmzero

You said you had a update for the brine shrimp feeder?

Yep. Its deployed on the tank and I am pretty happy with it. But have not gotten back around to cleaning up the model and getting it posted. Hopefully I will get it up sooner than later.

Originally Posted by vega77

Hi

Amazing build.
What kind of stepper motors are you using for the dosing pumps ?
Pancake nema17 ?

Thanks. The steppers I have been using are one of a few different 12V ~0.4Amp NEMA 17 motors found on Amazon or Adafruit.

[jrhupp]

Quick update; finally got around to tweaking a few of the brine funnel dimensions and getting it uploaded. A zip with the STL files can be downloaded from here: brine feeder files

Otherwise still driving hard on the controller and web UI. I still have a little bit of work to do with clocks. But hope to have the first revision installed and in testing this weekend. If that goes well I do a video walk through and post it up. So stay tuned.

Once the controller is stable I will get back to the ATO module and hopefully have something interesting to post related to it before too awful long. We shall see though. The temporary ATO has been working well since start up, so my motivation has been weak to get the final version done.

[NubbsJRN]

Hopefully soon I will be able to be asking more questions



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[ClownNut]

Originally Posted by NubbsJRN

Hopefully soon I will be able to be asking more questions



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looks like Anet A8.

[jrhupp]

Originally Posted by NubbsJRN

Hopefully soon I will be able to be asking more questions

Most excellent. That looks like some great potential.

[jrhupp]

Finally something exciting to share! I have the main controller up and running, and have been testing this week. A few hardware bugs, a lot of software bugs, and certainly many features yet to be implemented. But it is functional at the moment. Below is a short video tour (don't mind the shaky camera work; recorded on my cell phone).

The controller is the module on the lower DIN rail. When I pan to the computer, I have the controller's USB terminal open via the Arduino IDE on the left (so you have a sense of how it is interacting with the other modules), and the web UI open on the right. Hopefully the video is clear enough to get the gist of what things are and what is going on.



I need to make a hardware revision next and hope to have the board at least laid out by the weekend. After that it is on to revising some existing software features that perform less than desirably and adding in a couple things that it became evident I needed once I started playing with it. (and two lingering major features that are needed; an automated method of syncing the controller to the module and some clock work to handle when the yun doesn't have access to an NTP time server)

At some point further down the road I will do a mobile optimized layout. Most of the web UI is already generic enough that it works will on my iphone, but the flow control and graphs need some more work to be mobile device friendly.

I also took a couple of update shots of the display. I had been battling some "new tank" nuisance algae and had been less than excited about showing the tank off as a result. Things are on the up swing now though.

[hammerhead24]

any more pics?

[NubbsJRN]

I am printing mods and improvements as fast as I can get good prints

Once I get to the point I feel I can actually print stuff for my tank the first thing I would like to print is a better holder for my high water sensors in my display tank.

What do you recommend I use for cad software to design stuff on once I am not just printing others creations?

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[akmzero]

Originally Posted by NubbsJRN

I am printing mods and improvements as fast as I can get good prints

Once I get to the point I feel I can actually print stuff for my tank the first thing I would like to print is a better holder for my high water sensors in my display tank.

What do you recommend I use for cad software to design stuff on once I am not just printing others creations?

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I used tinkercad just to get a basic understanding of cad. Others like to jump right into fusion 360

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[jrhupp]

Originally Posted by NubbsJRN

What do you recommend I use for cad software to design stuff on once I am not just printing others creations?

I have done all my mechanical design in SketchUp. It is quite easy to work in and there are a number of user scripts to help with stuff that is challenging with the software's native tools. To that end I recommend SolidInspectorII and DrawWhorl as two must have scripts for working in SketchUp. The first for checking manifold and the second for modeling threads.

[jrhupp]

A quick update: I had the main controller running most of last week. I found a few issues with the power supply and I had made some oversights in implementing the reset buttons. So a second revision was needed and that is what I knocked out Friday night/Saturday morning. Thankfully I had everything needed on hand to get a version built and running.

Here are a couple of shots of the board:

[NubbsJRN]

Is the regular sketch up good enough or to be successful would I need pro?

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