Auto Top Up Update

I wrote the post about the auto-top up system a few days ago, and only got around to posting it today. Since a few components have yet to make it, I have finished the assembly and will simply open up the box and add the speed control later, as it is only a 5 minute job with a soldering iron.

So here is the almost finished system inside and out.. Not too shabby, I'm impressed with the way it turned out. I might make a few more and flog them on eBay to generate some much needed funds.

Over the Crimbo holidays I also coupled my skimmer air intake airline to a bottle in order to automatically empty the skimmer collection cup, Since the skimmer has a air intake line, I realised this suction can be used to remove the skimmate, so that the vacuum produced by the skimmer pump causes low pressure in the bottle, sucking through any skimmate in the collection cup. I have been dosing vodka daily in a bid to reduce my nitrates from 20ppm to 0ppm for the last ten weeks, and when my nitrate levels started to drop about seven weeks after the first dose my skimmer went mental. Previously the collection cup would take four days to fill, now it can fill it in half that time. Since I can be away for a several days at a time, this would mean my skimmer dumping the skimmate back into the tank, which would be disastrous. So I simply used a two litre drinks bottle, silicone air line and some Festo fittings. I use Festo fittings to plumb the fuel lines for my jet engines and they are ultra reliable and because they are push fit they are very simple to use. You can see the set up in the pictures below, from the skimmer collection cup, to the air intake and skimmate return. The skimmer return is placed below the intake, and is fitted with a wide nozzle, so there is no risk of it being splashed into the air intake. I added an inline adjustable valve to tune the bubble size/rate for the skimmer. When this cup is empty, air is drawn through a small breather hole in the top of the cup. The bottle now sits behind the tank, out of sight and only needs emptying once a week. Although the skimmate in the pictures below is that produced over the last eight days, giving me a comfortable two weeks maximum between emptying!

That's all for now fellow fungoids!

Edit!!
Parts arrived and I finished my revision at three in the morning and decided to finish the top up system. I even made a short video! Here is the system in all its glory!

Engineering DIY

I think its time for a brief interlude from wild ramblings of my checkered past with some light entertainment. Well it will be entertaining for those who have either fish tanks or like elctrickery. So unless you are into reef keeping I suggest you skip this one. As some of you know, I have a few fish tanks, and one of those is a marine reef tank. These tanks are a bit of a balancing act when it comes to maintenance. 

Firstly, they are expensive, eye wateringly expensive. The rock is called 'live rock' because it is shipped from the sea from the other side of the world, where people put lumps of rock into the sea, wait a year and then ship it round the world, so when you put it in your tank it has all the beneficial bacteria and critters that make a reef tank possible. So how much is it? Well about £10 to £12 a kilogramme. My small reef tank has 10 Kg!! Large reefs can easily have more than 100Kg. The cheapest, smallest corals are £10, a decent specimen usually around £50 and a particularly rare species, (in the trade, not the wild), would be closer to £100 or more... The fish are similarly expensive. The equipment also costs a small fortune, and you need a lot of it, lots of lights, pumps, protein skimmer, cooling fans, heaters, sump tanks, refugiums, calcium reactors, powerheads and the list goes on.. 

The final kick in the wallet is the water. Forget using tap water or even expensive mineral water. These tanks require that you have pure water from a reverse osmosis filter which you then mix with a specialist salt. This means there are no traces of Nitrate, chlorine, chloromine, fluoride, bacteria, gunk, plasters, tissues, small dogs, phosphate or copper from the water pipes, and I'm talking levels in the region of parts per million, which will at the very least cause a massive algae outbreak in your tank. At the worst you could kill all your fish and corals.

So why do I put up with all this hassle, well take a look..

With high power lights just a few centimetres from the surface of the water and several submerged pumps the temperature of the water can rise from a stable 27°C to close to 30°C, not good. So there are fans above the lights to cool them, this also increases the evaporation rate of the tank which causes the salinity level to fluctuate which is death to corals. My own tanks salinity will fluctuate between 1.025 and 1.027 over the course of a week despite me trying to remember to add RO water to top up the evaporated water. This means I notice the water level has dropped and I chuck in half a litre of water, which causes a quick change in salinity, not good either. So I was thinking about this problem last week and decided that there must be a way of making a system to automatically add water when the level drops.

I thought about a simple gravity-syphon method, but there would be no direct way of controlling the amount added so I would need an active monitoring system. A quick brain storming session and I had several ideas on paper before choosing a system based on a switch. A sensor would detect the drop in level and activate a pump, adding water. Once the level rose back to the required level, the pump would stop. I was going to use an Infra-red LED and sensor and use the light refraction through water to block the sensor, until the level drops and the sensor would then register the beam. But a quick experiment showed that the LED's were unreliable due to meniscus effects, water beading and salt deposits. I had a dig around my odds and sods box to see what I had and came up with these quick sketches.

The only thing I didn't have available were a pair of float switches, the rest consisted of a brand new, small geared pump, a PWM motor speed controller, some resistors, LED's, a 6v DC SPDT relay, (left over from a rocket ignition system!), a rocker switch, 6v Dc transformer plug, solid core wire, jack plugs, vero board and a project box. Cue a couple of hours of frustration as I tried to transfer the prototype circuit fom a bread board to the vero board as I couldn't understand why I kept short circuiting and blowing LED's. After many LED's and a lot of shouting I realised that the vice grip I was using to hold the board while soldering, had a metal grip and was shorting the copper strips.. Doh!

The power lead, switches and pump are connected to the box via three jack plugs. The first switch will detect a fall in water level and turn on the pump, once the level rises, the switch opens and the relay turns off the pump. Now should the first switch fail, the pump could flood the tank, my room, the floor, the ceiling downstairs..... So a second switch is in place above the water level that will turn off the pump just above the limit of the first float switch. This only activates should the first switch fail, acting as a failsafe. The two LED's indicates that the system is on, and when the pump is running.

Here are the prototype and finished circuits, although the finished circuit now has two red LED's on wires rather than attached directly to the board. The final picture shows everything ready to be assembled. Just need to print some fancy labels, drill some holes for the LED's, wires ect, and it's done. Doesn't look too shabby so far, just waiting on some small diodes and a 555 timer from EBay to couple the PWM speed control circuit to the relay circuit to allow fine tuning of the pump speed. This will allow me to control how fast RO water is added to the tank. A quick test showed that the flow rate at the lowest pump rate was around 500ml an hour. A bit too fast, might have to see about either finding a new pump or restrict the flow a bit, but I will see once the system is ready to install.

Now I could have bought a commercial auto top-up system for £65 to £120 and be done with it, but I get a real buzz from designing and building my own solutions. My system works, and once finished would look just as professional, so I see no point spending so much. If I had to buy everything new, then it would have cost me around £35, but since I had everything bar the float switches it has cost me a grand total of £11. I am waiting on some diodes and capacitors to couple the PWM speed controller to the relay circuit and then I can finish it. I will of course post an update once it is complete with a demonstration video.

I'm a bad man...

So Movemeber finished.. Yet my tash lived on.. Then sometime between 6pm December the 8th and 6am December the 9th it disappeared.... In reality it was so itchy and irritated I had to shave it and could bare the pain and annoyance no more. Removing it was a major task, my moustache hair was so coarse that cutting it felt like wire. I do miss it, and would have liked to keep it. 

I should also tell you that my idea that length of facial hair correlates directly to the frequency of being ID'd in the supermarket was correct. The very first time I bought booze after shaving, I was asked for ID, and almost everytime since.

In other news I am growing mushrooms. Not magic ones nor the cheesy fungus found in the depths of John Mc'Cririck unspeakable places, but nice posh ones. I found them in a 'grow your own mushrooms' box, wrapped up in colourful paper from Aerospace Girlfriend on Crimbo day. Now when your girl buys you mushrooms for Christmas you know she is up to something. What that something is, I have no idea but one thing is for sure, it involves fungus.

RIP tash. 1/11/2011 - 8/12/2011

Day 29. Confessions of a boffin...

With the 'stache at its all time longest I have started to ponder on whether keeping the tash may or may not be a good idea. It's starting to grow on me, both literally and figuratively speaking. It is even growing on Aerospace girlfriend and she kept pawing at it trying to see if it would twiddle 'Dali' style. I could see myself as a facial gardener, although rewind to a couple of days ago and I was literally rubbing my face on Velcro, combs, fingers, forks and Aerospace girlfriend's dog. Okay, the last one was a small fib, but I would have had he stayed still long enough. Plus the constant rubbing and stress from Uni has made my face hate me, and my skin has developed a dryness only matched by the Sahara desert. Luckily the mighty facial topiary masks the hideousness of the face. In fact every day in uni people comment on how it is a 'proper moustache'. Not sure what qualifies it as a proper moustache, although I am 100% sure it involves a hairy lip I am less sure of the other things. Anyway here it is, judge for yourselves.

Yaaaahhhhoooo

I can also comment on one small observation I noticed two or three days after I started to grow the moustache, in which I was no longer getting asked my age when buying booze. Usually I would have to have my passport with me as people didn't believe I was thirty one and once even though I had the passport, I was refused. This particular human being, and I use the term lightly, asked me for ID. I handed it over and had the pleasure of watching him struggle to compare me to my photograph. Why was he struggling? Well my passport has a photograph of me with a black mohawk hairstyle, and yet when I stood in front of him I had it dyed orange. Cue him calling his manager, and me questioning his parentage. I might call into Lidl tomorrow and see if the appearance of a moustache and normal hair will confuse him even more? Anyway I digress, my original point was that since I have started growing a tash I haven't been ID'd once. Nor have I been subjected to the scrutinising stares of the bored old women behind the tills who think all underage teenagers disguise the fact they are buying booze by cleverly hiding it amongst a trolley full of shopping.

I am often asked when am I going to update my blog. Well I'm sorry but one of the difficulties of being a boffin doing an engineering course at Uni is that some tutors have no concept of undergraduates needing sleep. This means I have no time to tell you all about my latest moans or the time I accidentally went dogging, (true story). I will tell you that I have come to the conclusion that once you're born a nerd you're always a nerd. I realised this while watching penguins. Yes you read that right, penguins. Instead of cooing at their comical walks or underwater aerobatics, I was watching the wing tip vortices's they create as they swim and thinking ''I wonder if I can apply lifting line theory and vortical lift equations to a penguin? I wonder what the lift curve slope of a penguin is?'' If you have some degree of normality then none of that should make any sense, if you understand what I am saying then you have my sympathy. But for everybody else I can only describe it as leaving the world of the muggles and going into Hogwarts. Once you know this stuff your brain cant switch off.

Day 21. Toilet Humour..

I woke up and went to the toilet as usual. I spend a good deal of my life on the toilet, and have read a few books and played a fair few games while perched on it. Not today, some kind soul had left the window open. Now I am not the kind of person who enjoys having the biting cold air caress my nether regions, nor do I enjoy having to endure ice cold splash back, which isn't pleasant at the best of times. It really annoys me, it should be a place of quiet contemplation like the cloisters of a priory or the Fortress of Solitude. Well technically it was as cold as the Fortress of Solitude but like Justin Bieiber I do not possess super powers, or maybe I do and cold is my Kryptonite. Being cold inhibits my ability to do anything, I lose powers of speech, my sight is blurred from the tears my eyes produce from the lightest of cold winds, while my shivering body prevents me from completing all but the most rudimentary of tasks. I can't even reach to pick up an item from the top shelves in the supermarket cold aisles because my nipples shrivel and the rubbing on my clothes feels like torture to me.

It was Saturday night. I closed my eyes and started the long drawn out process of falling asleep, trying to remember what coursework is due in and when, what things I need to do in the morning and then trying to go through the problems I'm having with some vague mathematics I'm trying to weave into a jet engine simulation. The multicoloured fuzzy shapes start dancing in front of my eyes, and I start to nod off in the silen.... "ARRAAAGHHHHHHHGGGLLLEEeee ARGHHHH WHAT THE HELL!! OH MY GOD ARGGHHHHHHHHH... WHAT THE... ARRRGGHHH '' Shattered the silence just inches from my ear. Now I don't know if you've ever experienced sphincter flutter, well I did and before I could understand what was going on I was bravely clung to Aerospace girlfriend hoping she could fight off the nasty shouty person so that I didn't have to get involved. But then as seconds passed and the shouting stopped and I heard the shallow breathing I realised it was Aerospace girlfriend having a nightmare. What could have made her scream like that? I didn't find out as she didn't want to tell me, and promptly fell back to sleep leaving me somewhat unnerved and now faced with a room where every shadow was some kind of monster who wanted to rub my nipples or worse. When I woke the next day into the bright light of rational thinking, I asked her ''So what was that screaming about last night''. I was expecting tales of vampire sheep, ravenous twisted readers of the Daily Mail running through the woods chasing us.... But no the truth was weirder if a little  mundane, apparently she dreamt I had springs for eyes...

Day 16. Suited and Booted

I have said this before and I'll say it again, I have seen the worse that the internet has to offer. I have seen society at its lowest, from 'two girls, one cup' to pictures of things removed from peoples anuses in accident and emergency. Google 'sheep hose alien dwarf sex' and in all probability you will get what you're looking for, nothing surprises me online these days and I could regale you with tales of strange internet sites and videos all day long. But I can honestly say that I was shocked when I found out that Justin Bieber is a mere mortal. I'm not sure that other people realise that our yellow Sun does not give him powers beyond mortal men. He cannot run faster than a bullet. In fact he is far slower, physically and mentally, than my old car. Nor does he wield a pair of nun chucks or posses sight beyond sight. No, it seems his ability is to make hordes of girls scream. It's like nothing I have ever seen before, turning teenage girl after teenage girl into puddles of passion under the might of his hands and inoffensive voice. I'm not sure this news has filtered down into the mainstream media, who continue to plaster his gimpy face all over the papers.

I had the unpleasant experience of wearing a suit to Uni today, not entirely sure the look suited me, no pun intended. As I walked down the road I passed some cars and the reflection looking back at me was not too flattering. In fact I looked like an extra from Brookside or maybe a wimpy version of Charles Bronson. Considering I had just done a formal presentation for one of my projects this did not bode well.

In other news mo'bros and she'bros here is the long awaited picture of the my moustache.. If it looks ginger, that's because it is. I should also admit that I am a fully paid up member of the Ginger Panthers. Ginger is not a colour to hide from, it's fire and passion! Not sure how to style the 'tache yet. I have a handlebar thing going on at the moment which involves minimum maintenance. I may need to construct some form of facial trellis in which to train the growth. That's all for now, so in the words of Bill S. Preston Esquire, be excellent to each other!

Day 15. Don't worry, be happy....

Things have been more than a little busy these last few days, This last year of my MEng degree has me working harder than Ron Jeremy's old chap. But I know that excuse wont wash with you my eager blog readers and I promise to get my act together!

I haven't really done very much except work, I did spend an enjoyable weekend at aerospace girlfriends which involved a poo. Not mine, or hers, In fact I am not sure who did it but it is one of two suspects, Bella Lugosi and Mr Sprout, two guinea pigs who live in Aerospace girlfriend's bedroom. These guinea pigs have previous poo flinging form and have become quite adept at launching a their droppings across the room at a rate of knots. Now it wasn't the rogue guinea pig poo that surprised me, or the fact that I was lay on it. It was the reaction of aerospace girlfriend who casually picked it up in a tissue and remarked ''It's ok. It's completely dry". Can't fault her logic.

I think as we get older we get used to getting up at the crack of dawn, getting ready, grabbing a coffee, the long commute into uni/work. Having to labour through the boredom and monotony of the day, putting up with slack jawed yokels, driving home again. Spend all night at the desk, watching the news, the mad dash for the remote when Hollyoaks starts, kicking yourself that you heard the theme music and you now also have to resist the urge to jam a pencil into your ears, and then the white noise of the local news drains the last of your will to live.. It is then that you do it. Ladies cover your eyes, guys, you know what I'm talking about. The 'twiddle'. I don't mean some dirty attempt at flicking one off to a thirty second, grainy Latvian Porn clip on some rip off Youtube site, I mean the old ballsack fiddle where you while away the hours rolling your ball skin about like a redneck whittling a stick. Don't be scared to admit it, I know you all do it, I do it. The whole point of me writing this blog is because I am growing a moustache to raise awareness to get men to touch their balls. Now this isn't some thinly vieled attempt to get you to inspect your bits, I do have a point. It's a tiny insignificant thing, but it's the small things in life that make it worth living and today one such small thing was watching an Audi driver go apoleptic because I blew him a kiss. 

He had tried and failed to overtake every car at every possible opportunity and after fifteen minutes had managed to get several car lengths behind where he started. After undertaking me and several others, blowing his horn and driving up everyones rear end he realised he was in the wrong lane and attempted to bully his way back in, usually people let them back, but not this time. The traffic lights changed to red and we all gently rolled past him, I was the last car in the line, while he was stuck there, stranded in the middle of a junction of several roads at rush hour. As I passed he desperately made eye contact and was gesturing for me to let him in, I shook my head. He called me a naughty word. I blew him a kiss. He literally erupted and realising he had nowhere to go, left to join another queue going the wrong way home. I realised that despite all the annoyance in the world, it's the small things like a quick scrotum twiddle or scoring one against an idiot that transforms you into the young, carefree teenager whose only concern was who was going to lick your balls that day, not whether you managed to finish that twenty page report and presentation...

So back the 'tache.. The worst of the itching has now passed, or so I hope and have had several comments on the bushyness of growth. But this has brought on a new set of problems, in that it has now started to collect food when I eat. Dammit, who'd have thunk it! These issues never occurred to me before I started growing it. I saw Dick Strawbridge and said that one! If only I had stopped to think that my large cappuccino froth or mayonnaise from a sandwich would find its way stuck onto my baby 'tache.. I can only hope my emulation will be worthy of the name Strawbridge.

Will post a photo tomorrow so you can share the power of my 'tache!