Aquarium Lighting and Weather System powered by Arduino! #ArduinoMonday

from Aquarium Lighting and Weather System powered by Arduino! #ArduinoMonday
by Jessie Mae

AM GEE shared his DIY project on Youtube!

DIY LED aquarium lighting project for my reef tank. The 660 watts fixture simulates the weather from Cayman Islands in real time. 3 x 100 watts and 18 x 20 watts multi-chip leds controlled separately by an arduino sitting on the lamp). Weather simulation is done by requesting weather info from weather underground by a Raspberry Pi and send the data wirelessly to the lamp. Fixture supports 5 different cloudiness levels. Exact sunrise/sunset and moonphase. Wind speed and direction (defines in wich direction and speed the cloud animation scrolls over the leds). Moon travels over the lamp over night. Soft start function. Remote controllable via Web application running on Raspberry Pi. Accessable over internet.
The music is also DIY

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The creator of this project shared more details on the Reef Central community blog

first i want to introduce myself a little bit. My name is Michael and i’m in the hobby for about 16 years now. My tank is a decent 520g mixed reef tank. I’m a sps lover, but dont ask me about colors of my corals I rather have a growing brownie than i dying pinkish purple yellow one.

I have to thank all contributors here on RC, fantastic! I’m silently reading here for years and learned a lot, thank you!
For now I want to introduce my new baby. A big LED fixture build on my own, completely. A big problem with commercial fixtures is often, that you have no chance to see them in action. You dont know if a fixture has enough power for your tank. And then there are all the LED ‘haters’ out there… But i wanted to switch from a MH, T5, Led combo (800 watts) to pure LED, nevertheless. Because i like to start demanding projects and i had absolutly no idea about electronics this was a nice project. So here are the facts and finally a video:

660 watts total (for the moment, upgrades are on the way…)
3 x 100 watts multichip led 12 K
18 x 20 watts multichip led 8 450 nm leds, 10 x 12K cool whites
real time weather simulation updated every 2 minutes, weather data taken from a weather station on Cayman Islands, or any other station i want.
5 different degrees of cloudiness
exact sunrise/sunset time
moonphase and moon travels over the lamp over night
softstart after sudden power off
remote controlling and monitoring via web application from everywhere on the planet where i have access to the internet.

What i like with this build is the possibilities you have with leds. Once I turned the fixture on, I never ever wanted to go back to the old 1980’s style metal halides!

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