I'm new here but I have my RA+ for 1-1/2 year now and I was using it on a fresh water tank for all the basic stuff.
The setup was simple and straight forward, only ATO with float switches, heating, fans to cool down and lights on/off.
But since a week i'm moving to a reeftank and bought a couple of extras for my beloved RA+
RF module + wifi + extra temp probe + expansion hub.
And I also have 6 peristaltic pumps, 12V motor driven and would like to use them but not with the relay box as , for me, it seems to be unproductive and a waste to use these AC main relays for dosing pumps.
So as I'm using a Maxspect P with it's controler I dont use the PWM from the RA+.
The idea is to have a single cheap ATMEL uC associated with each dosing pump reading the PWM output of the RA+. So the PWM exit will be like a bus line and all the dosing pumps will be connected to it and reading the duty cycle. Having a specifc dutycycle for start / stop assigned to each dosing pump. Simple.
I am using the free version of Bascom AVR for programming some Attiny XX chips, and having a chip for each pump eliminates the need of complicated timers and IRQ/watchdogs and can even leave the real dosing out of the RA+ as it can simply send the start signal and the pumps will do XXX numbers of turns (using optical sensor like a phototransisor / light gate system) or time based, or even using a simple potmeter to define the dosing time/counts and add a push button to start manually a dosing cycle.
But I'm not confident with the RA+ coding........
So what do you guru guys think of it ?
