Reef Angel Forum

I came home from work today and noticed all was dark at my tank. No lights, no pumps, etc. I immediately straight-wired my pump back into the wall outlet while troubleshooting so as was well.

As I started troubleshooting I noticed the green status light on the RA was on, but nothing on the display. Pushing the toggle button did nothing either.

As I started un-plugging cords from the outlet box (thinking something had shorted and was pulling down the box) I happened to unplug the relay expansion module and !bang! everything came back to life.

I next re-plugged all my cords and brought everything back up, and then plugged my relay expansion up, and all is well.

Any ideas what happened?

That is strange. Are you using a custom code?

Weird.
Did it ever happened to you before?
Let me know if it happens again.

never before, all is well today. Will advise if happens again. Thx

I had the same thing happen to me tonight. None of the device plugged into the Relay box were operational. The Reef Angel display was black and the joystick did not respond. After I unplugged the relay box from power and plugged it back in everything operated as normal. I noticed the problem because the portal graphs were not updating. Did this problem ever get fixed?

no, doesn't happen often, but periodically I'll get up in the morning, check my tank and it will just be down. Happened recently to a colleague of mine as well. Any clues or logging that could be done for troubleshooting would be helpful. Thx

Todd Krein, who is the guy behind the I2C protocol on the Arduino branch gave us some suggestions that I added to the libraries.
https://github.com/reefangel/Libraries/issues/52
The next update will have that patch.
The most likely cause is electrical interference that got to the main processor.
Usually this comes either from wavemaker turning on/off or electrical noise being introduced in the expansion bus cables.
Try moving the expansion bus cables and/or the svga cable away from ballasts or any strong source of energy. You may also try putting WM into constant on while you are troubleshooting the issue.
If you don't have any expansion modules, you may even remove the jumpers in the head unit.

Hey Roberto??

Could we write an alert on the portal that would notify us if all of a sudden the portal could no longer communicate with the RA? Thx

The Portal server doesn't pull data unless you are logged in.
You can do that with the Android app.

I use reeftronics.net to monitor my apex and also my Reefangel. I will get an email if there is no communication after an 1hr then after 6 hrs it emails again. Russ is super helpful as well. My name is dbmet on the site if you want to look at the graphs.

rimai wrote:The Portal server doesn't pull data unless you are logged in.
You can do that with the Android app.

How would you do it with the Android app? Thx

You set it to refresh data every x minutes.... It will tell you when it can't connect.

I want something that will message me when it can't connect. Can we do this?

I use AreMySitesUp.com for my home. For free it will check your website (ddns setup at home is ok too) every 15 minutes and let you know if it is working or not. I haven't checked, but maybe for a fee they might allow you to specify the port number and you can get a notification if the RA is down.