SeanH

For what it's worth, I would be interested in seeing the kit and how it goes together. If any one wanted to come up to my shop in Frederick, I would be willing to solder the kit or let you solder the kit on one of my electronics benches. I have high quality Weller pencil iron solder stations, thermal grease and high quality solder (though the spool I have been using is 60/40 rosin core - I'm generally working on older electronics so it doesn't bother me it's not RoHS). I have overhead lighting on each bench, too, which makes it nice to work. PM me if you're interested in my offer. For any one not familiar with this kind of work, get yourself a pencil tip iron of high quality with replaceable tips. Nothing is more frustrating than working on electronics with crappy irons that have poor temperature regulation and too large a tip. Weller makes irons worth using. There may be others, but I've never bothered to use anything else. For solder I would recommend 3/16" rosin core made by Kester or Ersin. There may be other good brands, but I've relied on those brands for 30 years. If you don't use a good solder, you won't get good flow characteristics, which may lead to applying too much heat to your components and melting something unfortunate. Or crystallized solder joints. Like most things, you need to use good tools and materials to get high quality results. Some one experienced with soldering could elect to use a butane iron, but I generally only use those in the field where I have no convenient source of power. Some one without the experience of using this type of iron shouldn't attempt it IMO because you have to do everything else right AND keep an eye on your combustion vent so you don't melt something with the iron's exhaust.

Open up the unit and spin the fans manually. If the fans all spin easily and rock slightly when coming to a stop, then they are physically good. If they don't spin easily the bearings are shot and you need replacements. The other option is the power source for the fans is bad - use a multimeter set for DC and check the voltage going to the fans. I don't know the voltage you should have on that fixture, but I would assume it would be 12 volts DC. It's not likely that all fans would fail due to a physical wiring fault if the thing is designed properly, but there is a lot of heat in a light fixture, so it's possible you could have a melted wiring harness. Trace all the wires and make sure they aren't melted and shorting to the frame. Make sure you unplug the light for this. BTW, it would make no sense for variable rate speeds for fans on a light fixture, if you think about it. The lights produce the same amount of heat all the time, so there would be no point. It wouldn't make a lot of sense even for multiple bank lights as the fixture would go from hot to hotter'n'H-E-double hockey sticks as lights turned on. I could see banks of fans associated with lights, but I think that it would be a silly design, too. Most of the light fixtures I've seen so far are not well thought out for heat dissipation and control.

Most consumer firewalls don't control out-bound traffic. What is the structure of your home network?

Looks like you can re-assign the port address also. http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=368 Might be your best bet for info - Neptune sponsor forums.

I couldn't really tell, from the documentation I downloaded, if the AC3 had an embedded SMTP server using port 25 or whether you had to configure a mail account. If the device is limited to sending SMTP traffic, rather than using POP3, I'm assuming the challenge would be authenticating the SMTP transaction using SSL/TLS or w/e Gmail is requiring these days. The reverse lookup on the source IP, which would flag as residential/dynamic and also be rejected by Gmail, also. I'm really making a lot of assumptions. I would assume then that because you are on the ISP's network, your AC3 can send to your account and you have your mail account forwarding traffic to your Gmail account? Well, anyway, one way to tackle the problem if you really want direct send rather than daisy chaining the mail accounts would be to use a SMTP relay service, like dnsexit. You can use authenticated relays or non-authenticated relays (but this usually requires a fixed IP, IIRC). They also supply dynamic IP services, for what that's worth. I'm not sure it's worth the trouble, although you can also use alternate port addresses (26,8001, etc) to get around ISPs who block port 25.

That was a really awesome description of a tide pool. Talking about the scallops and shoes reminded me of the Mississippi River where I grew up. We never swam in the river without shoes because of razor clams. The clams would open the sole of your foot open like a fillet knife if you stepped on them. Clams really love the Big Muddy. A couple of months ago I was out on a pier on the South River in Edgewater, MD. I had been working on my boat (in something like 98F, 85% humidity) and had to cool it because I was suffering heat exhaustion. How did I know? I couldn't remember how to tie knots that I've tied for over 25 years ... so I went off to the local pizza joint and got cool. When I came back at nightfall, there was a blue heron fishing off a floating platform. The heron croaked at me and flew to a nearby post, got disgusted with me and flew off because I wasn't leaving. I expected to see small bait fish or even some juvenile blues in the water, but it wasn't fish the heron was hunting. There were uncountable juvenile blue crabs swimming along the surface of the water! They were sifting the water for food, but I couldn't tell what they were catching. Probably tiny shrimps. The crabs were from about 1" to 4" in size. I had to watch them swimming sideways along the surface of the water for about 20 minutes because I had never seen this behavior from them before. Speaking of osprey, I have to pass 4 day markers on my way to the river and the Bay. Every one of them has a pair of osprey nesting on it and I watch their progress throughout the season as they hatch, turn in to fuzzies and finally fledge. I read some where that our Chesapeake Bay birds, which are all tagged by volunteers every season, some times end up in the Ohio Valley, so they get around. The other thing I read, if I recall properly, was that their average lifespan was about 3-5 years. Fishing birds apparently meet with lots of accidents. I can believe it because I've seen osprey on the Potomac grab a big fish, lift it out of the water, fall back in and use their wings as paddles to paddle to the nearest island (I saw this over by the Three Sisters if any one knows where that is). So, I'm guessing their fist-in-the-cracker-barrel attitude toward fish some times leads them to drown.

To take them or to post them? Does it take some special whizzbang camera?

Yes. I just won it in the raffle today. I used it this evening and can say it is a very nice instrument. Thanks to BRK for donating it for the club raffle.