Lighting

Time is short, so much to do and so little time.... once again I post about something I did almost a month ago. I almost skipped this one, but, blogs are about sharing experience and I think the pictures will be useful to teach people what NOT to do .

Compĺeted my annual maintenance cleanup... and concluded annual is too long a period to do it .

Before you see the pictures please mind that my refugium is lighted by a non direction compact fluorescent light, ...

Finally, after almost a year between planning, prototyping, building and coding, my DIY LED fixture came to life. On Sept 6th the woodworking shop, LD Marcenaria delivered the new hood (they are very good, super recommend them to anyone living in São Paulo). It looked good, had dimensions according to the Google Sketch I had drawn, seems strong, etc.

Installation was way longer than just swapping the old hood for the new one because I had to redo the Aluminum structure of the ...

First day of vacations, not feeling well, spent most of the day either at the bathroom or sleeping.... at night I was feeling a little better, so I decided to work on the Arduino sketch, try to finalize v1.0 of it. Testing was still needed, so I proceeded with the test generating sample light curves for the various day types. By day type I mean "clear day", "cloudy day of various intensities", "thunderstorm day", each defined by an Okta number from 0 to 8.
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Thursday I put the order in for the new aquarium hood, with my favorite woodworking shop, LD Marcenaria (great quality, they built all my apartment to my design).

The sketch below shows the hood's design, it is high so my DIY LED fixture will fit inside it, with the controller and the power source above it (on the tray that crosses the middle). The controller is the glassy box on the tray, and the power source is the smaller gray box.
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Attached Thumbnails

 

Two weeks ago I had the impression my hammer coral (one ployp) was getting fatter.... well, today I am pretty sure it is splitting into two polyps! That might seem "so what?" to you, but feels very rewarding to me. It is the first stony coral in the tank that not only survived in my water and lighting but is also growing (had one Acan polpy that died, three Trumpet polyps that also died and another hammer polyp that got eaten by a rogue peppermint shrimp).

Must be a sign ...