The Cassandra Blog

Okay, so yesterday I figured I would do something simple, add a few extra sticks of memory to my desktop that I bought on the weekend while driving around.

Turns out, while I was digging around inside the case (An old Antec 180, big honking lump of steel case), I knocked the cable running the CPU water cooler loose. I didn't notice at the time, and put everything back together and booted the desktop up....

About ten minutes later just as I was getting things going and patting myself on the back as it just worked right first time... SLORP down went the machine. Given how quickly it went down, I immediately went "Oh crap, what did I do to the CPU?", as it was classic motherboard thermal safety shutdown.

Opening the case, to find the culprit, the loose cable... however I also had *SPARES*... loose bits rattling in the case... turns out the Corsair CPU water cooling kits have their pump assembly (which fits over the CPU) warp if they get too hot, and it not only popped off the plastic cover of the pump unit, it also broke the PCB off the pump head, and appeared to have destroyed solder joints and much more.

Now, I know it was my fault, so I don't blame the kit for failing, however that sort of failure I consider a real concern as the kits are supposed to be used to be used to drop your CPU temperature, and a kit being able to warp and destroy itself at any temperature before the motherboard steps in and says "Nope, we're not doing this anymore, everything shut down", should not be possible. It's a major design flaw.

Anyhow, as replacing the kit meant taking the motherboard out of the case, I figured, heck, why not just replace the case too? So that's what we did, new Corsair 400R case (hey, I don't hate the company, I can understand that some products might suck and others work out well), and a Thermaltake Bigwater 760 Plus liquid cooling kit. The hubby wants to direct most of the heat from our desktops outside or somewhere else, not sure if he can do it, but a proper liquid cooler means we can extend the heat exchanger out of the cases and put them somewhere else.

Anyhow, I have piccies of the blowout of the old CPU cooler, will try and get time to drag them off my phone later today.

Okay, went for another round of checking out some aquarium stores.

I'm building up a good list of what places I like around the South Bay, the only one of the three stores we went to check out that was still in business was Neptune Aquatics. Those guys have a massive amount of marine/reef life (coral, fish, crabs, shrimps, etc), and a decent select of freshwater also. Looks like that have a decent plant selection also, so depending on how the plants in our tanks go, if we need more, might stop by there to pick up more.

I do want to get a small school (at most 10, as few as 6) of guppies for the mid-tank... though as I write this, all my fish are at the bottom of the tank swimming around and snarfing down another batch of brine shrimp

They also had a few things I've been looking for elsewhere, but not having much luck finding in any LFS. Just a small purchase here, but it covers the current concerns. So, first off they had the eshopps probe holder, it's a little plastic block with screws that hold the probes in place, and magnets to hold the holder against the tank side. I would have liked one that just hung over the tank side as I know the magnets eventually will fail... but we'll see, some of the newer neodymium magnets last for ages Also picked up some dead coral chunks specifically they sell them as calcium reactor materials, but I'm going to use them as calcium carbonate for slowly increasing the KH in the tank. I figure if that works reasonably (it'll take a few days to see any results, and a few weeks to see where things level out), then given the price of it, I can easily just pick up enough every six months or more to keep the tank stable.

The Malaysian driftwood is helping with balancing the pH a little, but I would really like to see better buffering in the tank than I have presently.

Also stopped by the LBBHS to pick up the last few parts to put the ATO together exactly how we want it now.

Okay, few minor changes to the tank today, as we've noticed some of the numbers going crazy.

First off we've picked up an in-tank feeding ring, the fish seem to think that it's neat.

Next, grabbed some new piping and stuff for the ATO, we missed picking up one adapter so we couldn't really use it as is, tomorrow we'll grab the adapter we need.

We also did a minor water change, as the nitrites were hitting way too high, 10% water change and the new numbers look good.

Also picked up some driftwood, should help a little with the tanks low KH... though I'm reading many conflicting reports... it's "Malaysian Driftwood", and the reports online are varied... oh well, as long as it helps level out the pH bouncyness, I'll be happy Even if it's a little lower than I've been hoping for.

Anyhow, no piccies as it's been a long day, and we drove around a bit due to sheer bloody-mindedness

Okay, so these past few days had a few minor changes to the tank.

• Added some more plants on Wednesday, tonight we added a small Hornwort bundle and a Moss Ball (both sets of plants from Petsmart). Hopefully this should make the little fishies happier as this gives the more places to hide. Assuming the plants survive, we'll be releasing a small sprig of the Hornwort to float free on the tank surface.


• I grew my first batch of live food for the fishies! Brine Shrimp, but still, I hadn't expected the reaction I got, we had fishies darting all over the tank snorting down the little guys. I don't think there's any left in the tank, in that I don't see any little floaties, so I'm making another batch


• I've written a small utility to help me track the water conditions in the tank, the Apex gave me a kick with its nice little graphs to actually start recording the water test results... so I figured, small little database on my little home Soekris, with a Perl front end and graphs from gnuplot.

Actually, I should talk a little more about the graphing utility. It's one of those small things that are so simple (to me at least, I've been doing them long enough now *grin*), but make a major change to how you perceive your data. I've run into many little situations in IT where just graphing the stuff for a week or two showed the main problem areas, and gave just enough of a kick to figure out the root cause... and yet others had spent months, or sometimes years, trying to figure out what was giving them grief. Sometimes seeing the little "oh, I see a mail spike that happens at 2pm every day... hmmm... wonder what causes that... oh it's a bunch of engineers who set all their servers to send 'I'm here' emails at that time? *facepalm*" (yeah, that's happened to me, though thankfully it was years ago, now it's mostly marketing sending out a mass marketing email or something.... on a schedule.... from a desktop.... *sigh*).

Anyhow, once the little utility has some decent data to show (I'm doing water tests in the tank every few days at the moment, just keeping an eye on the new plants), I'll post some of the graphs to show off what it can do.

It's rare to see these days, but I am extremely impressed so far with the Aquarium Tank Controller I got from Neptune Systems.

So, firstly the ordering experience was painless, I ordered online, and while ordering, noticed they happen to be in San Jose, now that's pretty much the next city over from where I live, and their address was about five minutes from where I work. Anyhow, I placed the order, and then talked to the husband, we figured, hey, what the heck, see if they'll let us will-call it.

Turns out, I emailed them and got this response back:-

Hi,
Yes, you can pick it up. We'll give you call/email tomorrow or Wednesday when it is ready.

Curt

Curt it seems handles the phone orders, and will-call stuff. Had the hubby go and pick the system up when they called today around 1:30pm saying it was ready.

Okay, so the what I got was the AquaController Apex System with a few extra bits and pieces. So the whole list of things I had to hook up was :-

• 1 Apex Base Unit
  
• 1 Temperature Probe
  
• 1 Lab Grade pH probe
  
• 1 Apex Display Module w/ 10’ AquaBus cable
  
• 1 EnergyBar 8
  
• 1 AquaBus Lunar Simulator
  
• 1 IO Breakout Box
  

So, I mounted all this to a offcut piece of plywood we had around the house, the EnergyBar is basically an Apex-controllable 8-port power strip with the ability to power the base unit directly, so that got mounted first, I actually mounted it low on the board as I wanted to keep the cables low, amongst other strange ideas.

Then across the top, I mounted (in order), the base unit, the lunar simulator, and the breakout box. I mounted the breakout box on the end as it is the one most likely to have weird cabling concerns from the various float switches.


The sticker you see on the plywood is the sticker that covers the AquaBus connectors on the bottom of the EnergyBar.

So, now for the really weird bits, checking the manual on how they recommend powering the whole thing up was interesting... first off they basically said I should plug the probes in first, so, okay, the temp probe was plugged in (I'd downloaded the full manual because the manuals that come with them are basically quick-setup instructions, and I'm paranoid, and like manuals in general *grin*), they claim that is pre-configured at the factory, so I don't need to readjust, so that went straight into the tank. The pH probe had to be handled specially, it got plugged in, but they recommend calibrating that before use, I was happy to do that (even bought the solution off them to calibrate it), but I wanted to deal with that after I knew it worked, so I left that as shipping with it's tip in it's little cover with solution.

Okay, so... the manual pretty much claims everything can be plugged in at first, but it's possible to plug devices in on the fly, so I hooked up the base and the display, ran the ethernet cord (Oh, did I mention, this thing is network-enabled *cackle*), then plugged the EnergyBar into the mains... And whammy, everything just worked, like the instructions claimed, and first time, no special fiddling.

Of course, I didn't have the lunar module plugged in, but I wanted to play a little bit first... after I got the "wee, webpage of fishyness" out of my system, I plugged in the lunar module, as they claimed, it worked out just by plugging it in, no reboot or powering off or anything needed.

Okay, so initial testing done, I set up the system basically, moved over the power cords from the stuff from the fish tank, and it's all working (okay, yeah, had to fiddle for about 15 minutes with some things first).

I consider this an amazing achievement as in the past 10 years or so this is one of the few items I have bought that were edge-use (as in, not everyone needs/should have one) that something has just a) done what they claimed first time no special fiddling or tweaking, b) just damn worked, and c) been so freaking easy I didn't need to read the manual.

I'm greatly impressed by these guys quick order handling, professional product construction, and simplicity of design, oh, and that the English manual appears to have been written by people who speak English, not drunken lemurs or something. If you are planning on getting a tank controller for your Aquarium, I definitely would recommend buying yours from these guys if you are in the US/Canada... I'm going to badger them in a few years I suspect for a 220v model for when I move back to Australia And I know I'm going to be buying my probe calibration solutions and other supplies from them, as I feel businesses who treat their customers with this level of respect deserve to be kept in business, and while my little purchases for those supplies isn't much, I would rather give these guys the money rather than any other company.