Kevin and Emme`s Biocube of High Powered Awesome Build (LEDs and Typhon Controller)

[ScubaSteve]

Holy mackerel, what the heck happened? I woke up and it’s frickin’ June! Time flies when you’re doing a PhD and having… errr… fun?
Well, I guess I should finish up this build thread considering the tank has been rockin’ for 6 months! Where were we? Right! Buttons!

Buttons

So, my biggest pet peeve about the Typhon controller is that the buttons don’t come up to the same height as the screen. This is a pretty half-baked mistake if you ask me. If you want to panel mount the controller to make your DIY project look, you know, not ghetto, you have to make button extenders. Luckily, I’ve got a 3D printer at my disposal, so custom button extenders for me! Yay!



Here we are finishing up the print on the first button extender. I basically designed these to fit over the Typhon buttons as a sleeve and with a shoulder at the top so that they wouldn’t slip out of the holes I drilled in the lid. They get sandwiched between the buttons and lid giving a nice, solid feel.



Here’s the lid assembled with the controller and button extenders in place. They feel way better than I expected.



… and another view…



… and another.

Control Enclosure

To minimize the number of wires running from the controller to the Biocube hood, I opted to use 2 8x22 AWG cables that fit in nicely where the two original cables for the PCs ran into the hood. I opted to use some sexy 8-pin DIN connecters:



These connectors are great in that the male and female ends thread together to avoid being pulled apart and to keep them moderately waterproof. However, I couldn’t find any female panel mount connectors in town, so I just went with male panel mounts. This is not ideal because the live pins are all exposed, so be careful if the controller is plugged in but the cables are unplugged!

So, time to start putting this work of beauty together!

I mounted the controller, driver board and power supply to the enclosure with 10mm countersunk M3 screws (forgot to take a picture of this). Here it is all populated:



Button her up and…. Voila!



Damn fine piece of work if I don’t say so myself!


The Power Compact Massacre (or How I Start To Love LEDs)

So, after pulling the hood apart a bit, this is what we were starting with:


Time to give’r ****! A few minutes of ruthless butchering later and the thing was gutted. Don’t break any of the plastic bosses as you are taking things apart! You need these to screw your heat sink down. If you do manage to break one, a little epoxy works miracles.

Conveniently, the heat sink fit in there like a glove. Just to recap, I used 1” - #5 wood screws to bolt the heat sink down. Here it is screwed in place:



I have two 12V 60 mm low-profile case fans epoxied together side-by-side and wired in series placed at one end of the heat sink. I have them mounted to the hood with double-sided foam tape to minimize vibrations. These things move some serious air! I kept the two 40 mm case fans that the biocube uses to pull in and extract air (I upgraded to new fans as the old ones were noisy as ****).

The protoboard you see there is one of several failed attempts to use a signal from the LEDs to turn on the fans. Transistors, optoisolators, low-pass filters, you name it… All attempts were foiled by how the Meanwell drivers work (I won’t go into it). It’s easier to have a dedicated PWM signal from your controller or just use the existing buttons on the top of the hood to control the fans. Seeing as how all my PWM channels were dedicated to my LEDs, I gave up and went with the latter. Oh well, I’ll come up with a nifty solution one day when I have some free time.

One thing that I see constantly in Biocube LED conversions is people taking out all the reflectors. I don’t get that. It looks sloppy because you see all the wiring and, while a minimal contribution to overall light, it does reflect light back down into the tank. Might not be much but it’s worth keeping them for looks alone. I notched the reflector a bit to fit the 60 mm fans and put it all together.



Lookin’ spiffy!

Another view, including a bit of the gong show that was my living room:

So…. The million dollar question: Does it work?


Holy ****, my eyes!

Seriously, I was seeing spots for a good hour after which led to a tragic face-to-door-frame incident – several beers and it being 2am at the time may have also contributed to this. Tough to say.

It’s not actually as purple/blue as it looks here. It’s actually just so bright that my iPhone is freaking out. It’s a very nice, intense white that is pretty close to what my 250W Phoenix halide looks like over my big tank. I’m impressed!

So, what does it look like over the tank?

Pretty… freakn’… sweet!



Corals fluoresce like mad and the colours on the fish render to be extremely vivid. It’s making me really want to switch the big tank over! Again, it’s not actually as purple/blue as the camera makes it looks. It’s a very intense white.

The OCW LEDs really make a big difference in terms of tweaking the colour temperature, in particular the green and turquoise. They really add some warm to the overall balance and give it a more natural feel. The red is necessary to temper the blues and greens, though I wish I had individual control over the reds. I find that the red can sometimes be too much while the green and turquoise are lacking. I found a happy medium but I wish I could separate that channel a bit.

Job Done! High fives all around!

[ScubaSteve]

So, several months out now, how’s the tank doing?

Awesome! Just, totally awesome.

I’ve opted to go SPS in this tank with a few high end palys and lobos. I was also given a super awesome clam by a buddy (Thank Jon!). All are doing really well. In fact, the SPS in this tank probably looking better than my big tank! I moved a few pieces from the big tank into the biocube and it’s incredible! I had a bonsai colony that all but shut down and was starting to look pretty sad (wasn’t getting enough light). Give it a front row, center spot under the LEDs and it’s going bananas! A friend of mine snapped this pic a few weeks back just before the lights went out. This was basically under just the TV LEDs with a touch of the RBs (and a bit of orange glow from the lights in the living room):



Pretty snazzy, no?

I also got a brown frag from my clam donor when he was shutting down his tank. I knew it was a milli or something similar but it was small, brown and hanging on for dear life. I gave it a prime spot in the tank and left it for two week (I actually forgot I put it in there because I was so busy with work). I checked on it randomly one morning and what do I see? A freakin’ Red Planet with crazy electric green and mind blowing reds! What the heck? Not only has the thing coloured up super nice, it’s growing like a freaking weed! It’s encrusted and putting out new branches faster than I can count. I also put a tiny A. tenuis branch in there that suddenly exploded into a bushy colony the size of a racquet ball. Nice!

Bare in mind, the only filtration this tank has is a piece of filter floss and it gets water changes from the water I pull out of my big tank (when I remember). Nothing else. By having tons of light and limiting the amount I feed the fish in the tank, all the SPS look like champs! To be honest, I don’t even know what the parameters are in the tank. This is the lowest maintenance tank I’ve ever had and it’s getting better results from my carbon-dosed, GFO/skimmer/kalk top off SPS tank that gets a ton of love. Go figure, huh?

I will try to get more pics up when I get my friend to come back with his camera. The LEDs mess with my camera too much to get a picture of anything other than blue. I promise they’ll come soon!

[daplatapus]

Lookin' awesome dude! Haha, I love hat clown hiding in the corner under the shadow of that pump. He too is probably saying, Holy ****, my eyes! JK

I believe you can run the OCW LED's individually if you really wanted to. Similar to the Cree 3-up's.

Those Typhon button extenders look really good too, well done.

[mike31154]

Great stuff. Those clear polycarbonate enclosures are very nice indeed, but looking at your photos, specifically the one below, I have a concern/caution you may wish to look into further.



I'm thinking this enclosure is almost if not completely air tight & you've got a power supply sitting below a bunch of electronic components in there! The power supply chassis is full of holes for a good reason, heat dissipation. I would recommend you mount the power supply externally or install a fan &/or drill a lot of holes into that nice enclosure. Only holes I see are the ones for your display adjustment pots & I really don't think that's going to cut it for venting heat. I don't know what size the power supply is, but I have two similar jobs running my DIY LED set up & they get quite warm. I could be mistaken & you may be fine, but my guess is you'll end up with cooked components or a fire if you don't make some mods to this set up.

Here are a couple of photos of what I ended up with, first iteration with a single power supply & 2nd is with current set up using two power supplies. Certainly not pretty, but tucked away out of sight in the stand under the tank & well ventilated.

[ScubaSteve]

Originally Posted by mike31154

Great stuff. Those clear polycarbonate enclosures are very nice indeed, but looking at your photos, specifically the one below, I have a concern/caution you may wish to look into further.

Oh, sweet! I'm glad you brought this up! I totally forgot to get into this but I actually spent a ton of time on this fact and wanted to talk about it.

First things first, the polycarbonate enclosure is actually a see-thru washdown enclosure that has a gasket that allows service in wet conditions. I won't call it waterproof but it's seriously water resistant. We actually used the same enclosure to make a payload box for my friends ROV project and it didn't leak (I was actually really surprised by that). Where the wires come into the enclosure I use waterproof strain relief.



Again, I wouldn't be sticking this thing into my tank but it'll handle some major spills. I also use this sealing wax that I get from work on the screws, screen and DIN connector to make them water resistant (I can't remember the name of the stuff right now, I'll have to look again when I remember). So the thing is really water tight. Also, there is 3 ft of cable from the box to the cube and I have the controller mounted in a spot away from the tank. If I'm getting significant amounts of tank water on the controller, the electronics are going to be the least of my worries.

So, water: not an issue.

Heat: Very good point.

I really wasn't wanting to drill vent holes into my nice waterproof enclosure but was prepared to do it if necessary (I actually designed a super cool bubble pattern that I was going to mill into the enclosure and then laser etch on top of). But when I was picking my electronics (particularly the power supply) I looked for parts that were rated for service in enclosed spaces and had thermal protection. Once the electronics were together I tweaked the power supply output to minimize the amount of power that needed to be sunk, thus keeping the heat down. Also, being the engineering nerd I am, I did some quick back-of-the-napkin calculations to see what the temperature rise would be and I was well in the acceptable working range. Because I had thermal protection I felt confident enough to just let it run for a few days completely enclosed to see what would happen. Luckily, I had a few days I needed to stay at home to work on some designs when this project was going online, so I was around to babysit. I tossed a temperature datalogger into the enclosure, buttoned it up and set the thing to full power (on a typical daily cycle). The temperature only went up to 30C in the box and on the outside the enclosure feels warm (as in higher than ambient) but not hot. In fact it runs much cooler than the controller for my MP10. We're pushing 5 months now and the temperature of the enclosure hasn't been an issue (and my house gets REALLY hot in the winter because we are on the top floor and no control over our heating).

Some other notes about thermal management and electronics: With the way I have the driver board mounted, there is free space around the whole board to allow for convective cooling, especially if I end up cutting vent holes into the enclosure. The power supply has vent holes in it for conductive cooling but also have a solid slug that is used for mounting as well as conducting heat to a chassis. I mounted this slug in direct contact with the side of the enclosure to help dissipate heat (won't dissipate a ton of heat due to conducting through plastic but it's butter than nothing). This is the warmest spot on the enclosure. Also, I put a 1/16" thick silicone sheet on top of the power supply underneath the drivers to prevent the driver PCB shorting to the power supply chassis. The lid is plastic after all and if someone pressed hard enough it could conceivably make contact with the power supply and short. Play it safe!

**Disclaimer: I would encourage others to err on the side of keeping all of the electronics cool and ventilated unless you are familiar with your components. I build solar research set ups that work in full wet conditions, so I've built a number of power supplies into these washdown enclosures and am quite familiar with their design and thermal behaviour. Again: Play it safe!

[ScubaSteve]

Originally Posted by daplatapus

Lookin' awesome dude! Haha, I love hat clown hiding in the corner under the shadow of that pump. He too is probably saying, Holy ****, my eyes! JK

I believe you can run the OCW LED's individually if you really wanted to. Similar to the Cree 3-up's.

Those Typhon button extenders look really good too, well done.

Ya, when I first put the LEDs in the clown was pretty confused. I had the hood off with no light for a few days for the build and then all of a sudden BAM! he's got a supernova as a tankmate. After 5 months he's good with it. It sure makes him look like a million bucks!

I probably could reconfigure the OCW to control the colours individually but alas I lack and extra driver. I'll keep this in mind though when I start the build for the big tank.

[daplatapus]

I've got some spare LDD's still if you need them.