melev

Power failure:
When the power goes out and I'm out of town, I get an email & a text to let me know. What I don't get is a follow up to let me know power has been restored. If the power goes out at 2 a.m. I have to ask myself if I should call my tank sitter to head over to my place to care for the situation.... or should I hope it all took care of itself? I've got some code in my system but it doesn't do what I'd hoped. Terence gave me a suggestion using a low voltage wallwort plug and a relay to show me if a virtual switch was live. What that would do is show me a green light if that switch was "on" - meaning there's power. What I want it to do is tell me the power is back on with a follow up text. If I wake up and there are two texts on my phone, one should be "power failure at 03:36" and the other "power restored at 04:01". That's what I want.

Alarm chime:
When the Apex encounters an issue and chimes the alarm, like during a water change that leaves the probes exposed to air, I need to push the button on the module to stop the chime. However, it begins wailing again within 15 seconds, and I have to push the button again WHILE I'm currently in the middle of resolving the situation. I feel that if a human being pushes any button on the Display Module, that should be good enough. Or do a reminder chime 10 minutes later if the situation still begs a solution. It's so annoying that I either: 1) unplug the module entirely, or 2) switch off all alarms and alerts via the App. The problem with the latter is I need to remember to turn them on again later. It seems to me that by pushing a button on the module, that equals 'a human is aware of the situation' and the thing should be quiet for a spell.

Backups:
There should be a way to backup all your programming in Fusion. If you burn up your Apex brain module, the cloud-based software should hold all my previous work in the cloud. When I install a replacement brain, it should allow me to restore what I had previously with my Apex Fusion account. At least for now if you use the older Apex Dashboard, you can export your XML file - IF you remember to do so. Most people probably don't think about it. With that sitting on your computer's harddrive, you can save yourself a lot of work. Make a backup often, especially right before you start making changes and then again a couple of days later after you see it is working as it should. If you need to roll back and restore, you'll be able to. Go to Configuration/ then to Load/Save and click the area circled with a blue box below. Save this file somewhere you can find it later, like a folder called Apex. It will always be the same filename, so you can overwrite previous versions.

In the meantime...
Perhaps some type of virtual switch can be put together... or maybe I can assign a feed mode... some way to push a single button and put the entire system on pause for a bit until everything is handled (like the water change scenario I mentioned above) to stop the alerts temporarily.

My Apex isn't nearly coded to its full potential. Today while talking with Terence at Frank's Tanks, it occurred to me that while I have it set up to turn off the skimmer if the waste collector is full, it doesn't notify me via text. They only way I know is if I happen to look at the skimmer or walk into the fishroom and see it is filled up. That's an easy fix, and I've added some code that should hopefully do the job.

I need to set up a switch that will turn off a group of things. For example with the water change, I want the return pump off, the heaters off, the top off system off. Then when I'm done I'd like them all back on again. With a little coding, it can be set to restart automatically after a fixed amount of time. Say 30 minutes, for example. It can even be staggered. Return pump on first, then 4 minutes later the skimmer turns on, and then 5 minutes later the ATO is restored. This would allow the water level in the sump to stabilize before the float switch can call for additional freshwater.

I may add a high level float switch in the sump. If the sump has too much water in it, it could notify me. That could indicate that the return pump has failed for whatever reason, even though power is on. Or that too much top off water has been pumped into the sump (unlikely as that may be).

I did purchase a WMX module to communicate with the Vortech pumps and the Radion lights. It looks like it will be a nice way to do more with what I already own. One thing that I definitely look forward to is the ability to quickly switch the Radion to white light for a few minutes to take a picture of a specific subject, and do so quickly so as not to spook whatever I'm focusing on. Then switch it back to its current state. I haven't had that kind of control with EcoSmart Live unfortunately - and the time I did want to do something, it invariably needed some firmware update that killed my work process at that instance.

When the Fusion Tour was over at Frank's this evening, I invited them over to see my reef setup. It's kinda cool to see this huge vehicle in front of my house. Tell everyone "Yes, they do house calls!"