Interested in Apex/RK controlled d120's?

[Rui Manuel Gaspar]

What you have pictured is the one that monkiboy got when he ordered me a few more pot boards.  It's not what mine looks like. 

 

Here are the pics of the board with the pot on my d120.

 

The back (with pot and 4 pin connector on the other side).  The labeled pin 1 and pin 2 are the vdim+ and vdim- pins.  I literally just snipped those wires and hooked them up to the two Apex wires which supply a 0-10V analog signal from their VDM module and it seemed to work fine.  I was trying to do it more complicated with a unity gain op-amp at Tom's direction to try to protect the Apex, but it probably isn't necessary.  Yours is way different if it uses PWM to dim.

 

 

Hello Alan,

 

So my two Chinese Fixtures have the exact same piece as you describe here. I have two of them!

 

Do you know if I can hook up both blues (for instance) to the same APEX port?

 

Or should I buy the aditional APEX variable Speed/Dimming module?

 

I have to control two fixtures plus two tunze pumps. If I understand correctly the main APEX unit comes with four ports. Is this correct? Is it possible?

 

And also thanks for your effort!

 

All the best,

Rui

 

[Rui Manuel Gaspar]

Hello again,

 

Here is a picture from my actual fixtures.

 

 

 

Once again thanks for your support,

Rui

[Rui Manuel Gaspar]

Hello again,

 

Another thing ...

 

When I build my DIY Led connected to Arduino I used a 10k Ohm pull down resistor to ensure the light were dimmed to 0 and also I used a 100Ohm resistor to protect the input of the arduino.

 

Can I use the same here with the VDM?

 

All the best,

Rui

[AlanM]

Hi Rui,

 

These lights dont dim to 0 with these drivers. So pull down doesnt help. Not sure if a large resistor would help protect the apex output. The apex is kind of a black box to me, and Im not clear on the current limitations on the vdm ports. I dont see why it wouldn't work to connect both channels in parallel from the apex vdm channel to dim them at similar rates. Origami posted a circuit earlier in the thread that was intended to isolate the apex from current coming from the evergrows, but I failed at getting it to work, just hooked it up to the apex, and crossed my fingers and it worked fine. Your mileage may vary. Base apex does come with 4 dimmng ports.

[Rui Manuel Gaspar]

Hi Rui,

 

These lights dont dim to 0 with these drivers. So pull down doesnt help. Not sure if a large resistor would help protect the apex output. The apex is kind of a black box to me, and Im not clear on the current limitations on the vdm ports. I dont see why it wouldn't work to connect both channels in parallel from the apex vdm channel to dim them at similar rates. Origami posted a circuit earlier in the thread that was intended to isolate the apex from current coming from the evergrows, but I failed at getting it to work, just hooked it up to the apex, and crossed my fingers and it worked fine. Your mileage may vary. Base apex does come with 4 dimmng ports.

 

Thanks Alan,

 

Perhaps in the future I would replace them by two meanwell if I manage to find the specifications on this fixtures.

I read somewhere that each VDM port would allow 250mA. I have a close friend that is very knowledgeable in electronics. I will give him a ring to see if we can put this to dim to 0

If I can hook up 2 blue channels in the same port, the 4 ports of the base APEX will suffice for now!

 

Thank you very much for your help!

 

All the best,

Rui

[Jon M Profeta]

@ALanM. I have the same fixture that you have. The d120. I am awaiting the arrival of my Da reefkeeper ALC. It has 2 separate ports of 0-10v to control the dimming. Now were you successful with shorting out pin 1&2 and hooking up Vdim+ pin 3 to + on the ALC and the Vdim- pin4 to the - on the ALC.

 

 

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[AlanM]

Yep, it worked fine, but I ended up just using this as a refugium light so I run it full blast all the time now growing piles of algae.

[Jon M Profeta]

Thanks man. This is such a great thread. So much work went into this. If I have any other questions don't worry I will ask. Starting with this. I have 2 full spectrum d120 I am just going to tie all the wires together so they work in sync. This should work with 2 drivers on each 0-10v. 2 drivers on the 1st 0-10 2 drivers on the 2nd 0-10.

 

 

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[Jon M Profeta]

O and I forgot to add. Should I disconnect the dimmer or can I just tap into the wires. I would love to be able to put it back to stock if I had to.

 

 

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[Jon M Profeta]

O and I forgot to add. Should I disconnect the dimmer or can I just tap into the wires. I would love to be able to put it back to stock if I had to.

 

Anyone know if I can do this?????

 

 

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[lnevo]

Homestly your in unchartered teritory. There has not been much followup as Alan abandoned the project and there have been very few success stories reported back to this thread. I know a few people on the ReefAngel forum who managed to get this going but even there it was only one or two people. We really need more people who may have read this thread to report back as to their levels of success. I do plan on doing the hack soon on my lights, but have been in no rush as they are the only lights I have and are still under warranty.

[AlanM]

You can disconnect the dimmer totally and just short out the on-off pins and do on/off with a power plug timer and dim with the 0-10V signal if you got a 4 pin header that matched the one on the dimmer board.  It's a standard pin spacing of 0.1 inch, I believe, so it might be really easy to find.  Or just shove wires of the right diameter into the holes on the connector.  Then you don't have to snip the wires or mess up the board.

 

Whether you mess up your controller or the drivers is a different question altogether, heh.

[Jon M Profeta]

Inevo you have the link to the reef angle forum.??? AlanM this prob what I am going to do. Just connect the two on and off together then take the dim+ and dim- and hook up to the controller. So if I leave the dimmer inline I should leave the intensity at 0 right and just never touch it.

 

 

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[David g]

 

Update: I am driving 3 Nova A8s, which would be 12 LED drivers all from 1 PWM pin on the Reef Angel Dimmer Expansion. Works fine. Some of the banks are brighter than others at low PWM signals and I think that is more to do with adjustments on each driver. Works great.

 

I've started looking at my D120. I have the same rheostat dimmer board as show by AlanM except I have two connectors on board, but only one used. Otherwise, the pot looks the same:

 

I opened up the driver, labeled as Well-LIT LT-PCB-9076C.

 

 

 

New to this but mines gone and broken itself I have the same bord as you but need to find a replacement I'm in the uk can anyone help ?

[lnevo]

So the ReefRadiance DM-155e is now apex controllable as an option. The interesting thing is they are selling a conversion kit. This unit looks just like all the other D2040 out there. Anyone think it would be pretty straight forward to use this kit on other D2040 clones?

 

http://reefradiance.com/dm-155e.html

[lnevo]

I am hoping to have some news about this kit soon. Will keep everyone posted

[AlanM]

Neat

[lnevo]

I have been told the kit works with the generic Evergrow D2040 fixture that I bought. I have placed an order for two and will be documenting the install as soon as I can. I'll be sure to take plenty of pictures so people can see if their connections, etc will be compatible.

[lnevo]

The kits have been delievered. I'll be doing the unboxing tonight and probably the replacement sometime this weekend. I received the installation instructions this past weekend. Everything seems pretty straight forward. From what I've gathered this is a replacement of the stock dimmers. Holes will need to be drilled into the case in order to add an RJ-45 jack that is compatible with the 2-channel Apex wiring layout (pins 1+2, 5+6)

 

So far, the only disconcerting thing is that it says to set the Apex operating parameters at 45-70. Effectively this puts the number of dimming increments at only 25 settings. However, there is some good news as supposedly less than 45 and the unit will be off and higher than 70 will stay at 100%. This is good becasue previous hacks reported having flickering below 10% and required turning off the ports that the lights are connected to.

 

Now, I'm not sure how the Apex deals with dimming, but I'll be using a ReefAngel. Currently the built-in dimming ports no the RA are set from 0-100 just like the Apex, but the dimming circuitry is actually 8 bit and can be set from 0-255. The newer dimming expansion modules are actually 12 bit and are capable of being set from 0-4095. What does this mean? Nothing yet...

 

Alan has been helping the RA community add support for the higher resolutions. For the stock dimming this would change the operating range from 45-70 to 115-178 giving us 63 increments of dimming (remember this is using an analog singal...) and if you are using the dimming expansion, we'd translate that range to 1843-2866, giving essentially 1024 increments of dimming. Which every dimming port you use though we should get really nice smooth dimming on the ReefAngel. I don't know if Apex does the same in the background or not. Would love to hear from those that have more details.

 

Anyway, very excited about adding dimming capabilities to my D2040 fixture. I really hope to have good news to report and let everyone who has one of these lights get in on the controller action If anyone has any questions or wants a specific picture of something, let me know.

[AlanM]

I don't know how the Apex handles dimming.  I know you can only set integer values as percents from 0 to 100, but internally if you made it go from 10% to 20% over the course of 10 hours would that mean that you'd get one step of voltage from 1V to 1.1V to 1.2V, etc once per hour or that you'd get some nice even slope. 

 

For the Reef Angel I had to change the PWM Slope dimming functions to evaluate what level they would be at once per second because if you had 4095 levels of dimming, which the RA chipset has, you would lose all that precision if you just checked once per minute like the libraries were doing previously.

 

When I was putting a voltage on there I definitely saw flickering down under 10-15%.  I have no idea what else they're putting in there to turn them off.

[howaboutme]

Great job guys!

 

If using the stock dimming, which I am assuming is the one on the main relay, will I notice anything when ramping up or down considering the lower (but still higher thanks to Alan) resolution?

[AlanM]

From the ReefAngel, those ports on the main relay box are called Actinic and Daylight.  You should notice them ramping up smoother if you are there watching when the lights are very dim.  Those steps you can see.  In the middle of the dimming range it won't make much visual difference because your eye can't detect the difference between 51% and 52%, but it can easily see the difference between 1% and 2%.  It suddenly gets twice as bright, heh.

[howaboutme]

Got it. Thanks, Alan!

[lnevo]

 

 

 

 

So, not much to it. It's swap in replacement dimmers connected to a nice rj-45 port. They seem to have a lot more circuitry then the stock ones.

 

I'm lacking the right drill bits and usb cable for my dimming module. So I have a bit of shopping to do.

Edited August 6, 2014 by lnevo

[howaboutme]

So you're going to strip off the RJ45 and attached the RA cable?