So having gone with the AI Sols, I wanted to see how well they were lighting the tank. The goal was always to have darker areas and more well-lit areas, I didn't want to blast everything in the tank with bright light, I wanted something that looked a little more natural.

So I started looking around for PAR meters - there's a couple of DIY projects but nothing calibrated and "ready to go", so I caved and looked at the professional ones. Apogee's meters seem to be the normal...

Wow! was it really over a month ago that I last posted here!

Ok, well things have been happening, but just much more slowly than before. Before I started stocking the tank, I wanted to get a quarantine system up and running, and that took longer than I thought it would.

The plan was to use the garden shed as the location (since we're, ahem, space constrained) and I thought I'd set up another identical auto-water-change/topoff system as I have on the main tank, so that...

So, it's been a while since I posted here - even finding the thread was something of a job, it being on the 13th page now. I *do* have a good reason for that, and he looks like this:

[CENTER][IMG]http://0x0000ff.com/imgs/matthew.jpg[/IMG]
[SIZE="1"][B]Matthew, born 23rd Feb, weighing 7.56lbs and standing 19.5" tall[/B][/SIZE][/CENTER]


Now that mother and baby are home and doing well, I'm going to start work on the lighting system over the...

So I was ready to start talking a little about the reef-controller I've been working on for the last 9 months or so, and I sought some clarification from RC admins about whether I ought to post about it online.

Turns out that since there's a (small) possibility I might want to make this commercially available, the answer was "Don't do it", unless I'm certain I'm going to release it for free. Yeah, I know, there's a million-and-one reef controllers out there, where's the...

Things may appear to have been quiet on the Western front, or chez nous, anyway... Not really [grin].

The major work at the moment is going into the software driving the controller, and since I only want to announce that when it's finished, y'all are gonna have to wait... I'd say I'm getting closer now - it's maybe 60-70% done. Another couple of months would do it, if we weren't about to greet our first child! So probably now another 6 months out...

There's some more...