Reef Angel Forum

Hello everyone,

Well, I have tried building my own controller for my aquarium in the past and honestly....I am ready for a real one. The more I have learned about the Reef Angel, the more reasons I find to buy one. The race was between RA and obviously the Apex. But I love what RA does and the technology it is based on. BUT...before I buy I just want to see if you current users can help me out with my question:

I built one of the DIY Aquastyle kits for my LED fixtures. Actually, I won one in a raffle. So I have 72 LED's on my gallon reef. The kit came with the meanwell driver boards with the LDD drivers installed. The controller connects to the "drivefirst" board which controls all the separate channels. The controller connects to the boards with a CAT5 cable. I am curious if I can remove this Aquastyle controller and just use the RA to control the drivers. I have found another thread stating that this is possible if I find the pinout of the CAT5 from the controller. I can then splice one end of the cat5 cable and connect it to an older syle dimming module. So I am curious if anyone has successfully done this or has been able to determine the pinout of the controller from aquastyle. I have contacted Ray from Aquastyle and he has stated that he does not have the schematic for the controller. I hope this makes sense. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks again!

Jay

If you send me the controller, I can probably scope the pins to find out what they are.

Does it get power from the controller too or just the dimming signal? Of so it might just be an apex compatible ethernet cable which would be channel one on pins 1+2 and channel 2 on pins 3+6. If it's got more than 2 channels or power you might be better off letting roberto have a look. Pictures might help too

Hey,

Thanks so much for the replies. Unfortunately if I unhook the controller I wouldn't have any light control while it was gone. So I don't think sending it to you Roberto is a good option. I do greatly appreciate it though. To answer the other questions the controller does just supply the drivers with the dimming signal. It does not power the LEDs. There is a separate power supply for that. I am running three different channels off of 6 ldd drivers. What I might do is just build a driver board and that would allow me to connect each driver to a port on the dimming module ....correct? That would be pretty cheap to do and not all that complicated from what I can tell. This doesn't sway my decisions but just wanted to get some input.

Yeah if you can get a 6up driver board, you can reconnect the led strings to the new board. If the drivers you have are the socket ones you should be able to just swap them to the new board, power from the same place and then you can wire that directly to your RA dimming module. I'm not sure how many channels, but there is also the RAnet dimming board that might save you having to worry about the current drivers, etc. For the first solution you'd be able to control each of the 6 channels separately unlike before. And if the ranet one has 6 channels that would be pretty sweet

If you are running LDD drivers, all you need is a dimming module. It's got 6 channels that can control the dimming of your LDD drivers.
It has configurable jumpers that you can set it to 0-5PWM signal, which is what the LDD drivers need.