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Robo-Tank v6.6 is Ready
#41
Rob,

Thank you, I was able to get into the system after I followed the steps above. One thing that I did which was not correct was used the code as you provided - sudo usermod -a -G www-data username, this did not work, then I changed the username to reefpi, don't like pi, then it worked.

I am moving from a reef-pi system to Robo Tank software so a few things are confusing. Is there a manual that tells the setup process. It would be great if you can create separate how to documents and add a link to the document on the page where the setup is being done, this will make it easy for folks like me to get to the document, easy for you to make changes to just that document as you are adding more features. It would be great if you can add a send feedback text box as default on all the pages so we can provide you feedback directly from the page we are in.

It is very confusing on how to get the devices to turn ON after a reboot. I configured the sensors and enabled them. To me this meant that they would turn on after a reboot, but this was not the case, I then manually turned them on and clicked the red dot to resume the auto mode, this made them turn ON but after a reboot they would turn OFF - need this for return, skimmer, wave maker for my system. Also a delay would be great for skimmer to turn ON after a few minutes to allow the water levels to stabilize so that there is no overflow. I noticed that during configuration if I edited the name of a power bar port and then without saving if I added the icon, it would save the icon but cancel the change to the name. I changed all the names then added the icons and then hit the save button, this saved the changes.

Need more clarity on how the heater needs to be setup, I setup the rule to turn ON the heater if temp is >= 78. Do I need to setup a rule to turn it OFF once the temp is greater than 78.5? Is the first rule sufficient to where once the temp sensor reads 78 the system automatically turns off the heater? Also did not see an option to calibrate the temp sensor.

I tried to setup the ATO and had a major water leak in the house because the ATO did not turn OFF. Need more clarity on how to get ATO setup done.

At this time I want to get the basic features working and need help to get this done.

Thank you for your prompt response as always!

Ramana
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#42
Hi Ramana, glad you were able to get it working, sorry I forgot to mention to change the "username" in that command to the username you have setup.

At some point the manual will be built into the app, each page will have a ? mark icon that explains how it works, at least that's what I'm thinking now however there still lots of things I need to do so that's kind of on the back burner.

Thanks for letting me know about the icon / custom name saving issue, I'll take a look at that.

Currently when the controller reboots all ports are turned off then it immediately goes through the schedules to see if any ports should be on based on them, if so it'll switch on. It also runs through the custom rules and does the same. For example with the heater, that does require 2 custom rules, one to turn on another for off. When the controller boots it'll check the temp sensor based on the rules and turn the heater on if required. A dedicated heater/chiller system is something I'm working on next, this will make it easier to work with and will allow backup sensors and some other features.

I'm thinking about adding an option for custom rules to trigger when the controller reboots, this would allow you to set how long it should take for some equipment to turn on such as the skimmmer.

The same will be for the ATO, it'll have it's own page, that's what the ATO icon at the top is for. Today you need to create 2 custom rules to setup the ATO like the following.

If sensor 1 is not touching water for 60 seconds turn on outlet 2.

If sensor 1 OR sensor 2 is touching water for 2 seconds turn off outlet 2.

The off rule is an example if you use a backup sensor as well.

As for the delay for a skimmer that's something I will have to add, if you control the skimmer with the custom rules you can add a delay before it switches the outlet on. This delay is on the "You can add a delay before the equipment is switched!" page when you create the custom rule.

Sorry to say but all this will take some time, unfortunately at this time it might not be able to do everything you need. If you want to post some pictures of the custom rules you've made I can verify what should happen.
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#43
Rob do you have plans to release something with ability to customize/delete a group schedule? actually im deleting the full set of schedule from DB when i have to change something (having 4 pumps dosing hourly every day means 24*4 items to delete/change one by one from the interface, much faster to delete everything from DB)
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#44
I've got all kinds of plans. :)

I'm actually going to drop the group schedules and redesign it to work similar to cron jobs. Even with the ability to delete groups it's not so nice having possible hundreds of schedules, it also takes lots of memory in the backend which isn't necessary.

Just so everyone knows I'm still working on this, the last couple weeks I've been trying to improve things I've had on the list, one thing I'm really happy about, as I attempted this a few times, I have the dygraphs reading from the database now so no more CSV files. The nice thing is from day one I had the temp and pH saving to database along with the CSV so after update you'll still have all the data. This is huge because now I can allow custom charts, a person can put as many parameters on one chart and toggle them on/off. As someone suggested to me, I'm going to add ability for users to manually record other parameters so they can use data with the charts. I added a bar chart for the dosing pumps, when a dosing pump is added the chart is created. it shows how many seconds the pump ran for and how many milliliters. Seconds shown is actual time when pump turned on and off so it'll be obvious if something isn't working properly.

Top chart is 7 day view and bottom is 3 day view. The charts do have a few anomalies as the backend wasn't always running.

[Image: charts4.PNG]

Unfortunately I did waste a good week+ trying to get the websocket working bidirectionally. Currently the frontend can only initiate the messages but I want/need the backend to send messages to frontend but I'm unable to get a listener working. 

Anyways back to schedules, my plan is first I'm going to get a heater and ATO system in place then I'm going to tackle the schedules and then add some extra features to the custom rules.
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#45
thank you
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#46
Hi Rob,

I now have most of the things setup. The screen shots show the schedules and rules I have created. Let me know if I need to make any changes or any other ones that I am missing.

   
   
   

A few questions and suggestions:

Dashboard: 
Looks clean, can you provide the user the ability to change the background from dark to light.
Allow users to add other graphs, e.g. ATO on/off.
How can we change the scale of the graph? I see an option but not sure how it works.

Rules: 
I am not able to edit a rule that I have created. How does the rule work - e.g. I have my ATO pump set to go OFF if the water level is low in the ATO. If the tank level sensor is low, will it trigger the ATO pump? Will the system check for all rules to see if there is a conflict and how will it respond? (As I was writing this I realized that I need to create a new rule if tank level is low for 5 min then send an alert). Would be great if we can setup a reminder for the alert to resend email after a set interval and repeat for x number of times.

Scheduling:
It is fairly simple. Have not played with the more complex ones. For now I have setup schedules to turn ON my - return, wave maker and skimmer around 10:00 pm daily. Since my tank is only 24G AIO, I sometimes turn OFF the return and skimmer when I dose chemicals. I am able to edit the schedules. Since there is no startup schedule, I plan to replicate the same device turn ON steps once every 4 hours, so that in the event the system reboots the equipment will come ON. Would be great if I turn ON/OFF multiple devices in one schedule, I tried to select multiple devices but I could not. Also, the ability to copy schedules and edit them.

Calibration:
PH calibration was easy and was able to do it fairly quickly.
Temp calibration - noticed that it is missing. Since I use the DB probes, I coated mine with liquid plastic to avoid corrosion. The means I need to calibrate the temp sensor to compensate for the extra layer of plastic. Would be great if you could add something.

System:
I noticed that there is currently no option to backup the system setting. This has saved me a couple of times in the past when I was tinkering the reef-pi and testing Robo-Tank. I was able to quickly revert back to the old configuration and restore the settings if the SD card died. Please try to make this a priority upgrade if possible. If there are other ways to accomplish this let me know the process to save a backup and restore a backup.

Sensors:
Adding them was fairly easy. It would be great if you could show the current status of the sensor on the screen where we sit each individual sensor. During the setup for ATO, I had to go between screens to see the status since the - invert logic option is available.

Dosing - how do you mount the dosing pumps? If anyone has a 3D printer drawings please share them. Much appreciated!

So far, I love it and I think with a few more tweaks it should be great.

Ramana
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#47
'If you happen to be using one of these' https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/b07gwj78fn/ref='ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I made this bracket
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/llpIdlAmIua
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  • Enigma79, Rob F
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#48
Hi Ramana, for what I can see with the custom rules they look good to me. The temperature will swing 0.5 degrees between on/off and if it ever hits 80 degrees based on the 3rd rule it'll send you alerts. For now there is no "dashboard" alert, I'll be adding a panel where they show up.

That's interesting what you did with the ATO, looks like it should work ok, best to let it cycle when you are there to make sure. Also for the first while check the logs to make sure things are looking good. One thing to note on the temp sensor rules, it's possible in the log you see a bunch of repeats saying it turned off the heater. This is because if the temp hits 78.5 that rule will run turning it off, if the temp teeters on 78.4 - 78.5 the off rule will continue to run every time it hits 78.5 even though the heater isn't actually on. If I don't forget I'll have that fixed next release. It's harmless doing that, just clogs up the log and can be confusing.

For the schedules outlets 1, 2 and 6 will always be on. I see you staggered them 5 minutes but that won't help any as they will never turn off. If you reboot the controller at 10:00pm it'll work but that's unlikely. Anytime after 10:10pm they will all come on as you experienced but I did thing of a way to fix that if you have a spare sensor port.

Either connect a switch or a jumper to a sensor port like this float switch example. If you used a switch you could manually turn them off and when you flip switch to turn back on they would startup with the 5 minute intervals. As long as the switch is on they would always run.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F95a...lvlouvq7ae

To do this delete the schedules and create 2 custom rules if you use a toggle switch. If you just use a jumper so it's always on you only need the on rule. Write them like this. When the controller starts up it'll check the status of the switch and run on of the rules. If you have an order to turn them off you can adjust the off rule with switching timers.

[Image: rules28.PNG]

Dashboard: 
Looks clean, can you provide the user the ability to change the background from dark to light.
Yeah at some point it'll be fully customizable but this will take some time as there's lots of other things ahead.

Allow users to add other graphs, e.g. ATO on/off.
There will be ATO, heater and dosing charts along with custom in the near future.

How can we change the scale of the graph? I see an option but not sure how it works.
You can only change the view range from 1 hour to 90 days using the buttons when you hover the chart name. The MA text box is the moving average, if you play with that you'll see it update.

Rules: 
I am not able to edit a rule that I have created.
Can't edit today, have to delete and recreate.

How does the rule work - e.g. I have my ATO pump set to go OFF if the water level is low in the ATO. If the tank level sensor is low, will it trigger the ATO pump? Will the system check for all rules to see if there is a conflict and how will it respond? (As I was writing this I realized that I need to create a new rule if tank level is low for 5 min then send an alert). Would be great if we can setup a reminder for the alert to resend email after a set interval and repeat for x number of times.
When you read out the rule it'll do exactly as it says. Just remember if you have something turning something on you'll need to create something to turn if off, could be a schedule turns on, rule turns off. At this point it doesn't check for conflict so do make sure there are none.

Scheduling:
It is fairly simple. Have not played with the more complex ones. For now I have setup schedules to turn ON my - return, wave maker and skimmer around 10:00 pm daily. Since my tank is only 24G AIO, I sometimes turn OFF the return and skimmer when I dose chemicals. I am able to edit the schedules. Since there is no startup schedule, I plan to replicate the same device turn ON steps once every 4 hours, so that in the event the system reboots the equipment will come ON. Would be great if I turn ON/OFF multiple devices in one schedule, I tried to select multiple devices but I could not. Also, the ability to copy schedules and edit them.
I will be addressing some of these issues with scheduling in near future, the rules I posted above should solve the skimmer issue. There's actually a bug in v6.6 when editing a schedule, if it isn't a dosing pump schedule it won't update, program actually will crash but start back up in 3 seconds. Someone pointed this out so I have it fixed for v6.7. For now you'll have delete and recreate like custom rules.

Calibration:
PH calibration was easy and was able to do it fairly quickly.
Great.

Temp calibration - noticed that it is missing. Since I use the DB probes, I coated mine with liquid plastic to avoid corrosion. The means I need to calibrate the temp sensor to compensate for the extra layer of plastic. Would be great if you could add something.
This will be added with the heater system, quite a few ask about this.

System:
I noticed that there is currently no option to backup the system setting. This has saved me a couple of times in the past when I was tinkering the reef-pi and testing Robo-Tank. I was able to quickly revert back to the old configuration and restore the settings if the SD card died. Please try to make this a priority upgrade if possible. If there are other ways to accomplish this let me know the process to save a backup and restore a backup.
This will be something I'll be adding, just so much to do but it is important. I'm going to have an auto backup system.

Sensors:
Adding them was fairly easy. It would be great if you could show the current status of the sensor on the screen where we sit each individual sensor. During the setup for ATO, I had to go between screens to see the status since the - invert logic option is available.
Yeah more for later. :)

Thanks for your feedback.
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#49
Hey Rob,

Thank you for pointing out the ATO, had to go back and add a additional Rule that if the Tank sensor is touching the water for more than 1 sec, TURN OFF the ATO pump.

That is an interesting way to turn ON the devices based on the float switches. I sometimes turn OFF the return and the skimmer while I am dosing so that the food does not go through the filtration section of the AIO tank. This will cause the water level to rise in the rear section of the AIO and will make the system think that the power just turned ON and start the skimmer and return. I think it will not work in my case given the small tank and the way I am doing things.

One more suggestion that you could include in the software is the ability to record parameter test values. Should be daily easy for the basic parameters, Parameter name - standard limits. Values will be the test value and automatic date and time recording. You could show the values as a table initially and then work towards the charts.

I have to say this - I have the first version of Robo Tank and am still very happy with the product K05118 . It is a work horse. Prior to this I put a lot of money into Vertex Cerebra and the whole thing was a waste of money. Keep up the good work Rob. I will get the latest version one I setup my second tank. Glad that you are building software that is still compatible with the older hardware.  K05164
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#50
Hey Ramana, glad to hear you're still enjoy it and thanks for test driving the app. I will be adding the ability to manually record test parameters so they can be used with the charts, someone made a mod to do just that so I'm halfway there.
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#51
Rob,

Update looks great? Does this version still need to be on a Buster install and not Bullseye? Putting some much needed love back into my tank after getting some new lights and figured might as well update RT version while I was at it so going to load a fresh SD card up and want to use the correct version.

Thanks,
Matt
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#52
Hi Matt, thanks and yeah still need to use the buster install. This is due to how Quickmail library is being installed, the normal process didn't always work so I started just coping the installed files but there compiled for Buster. I need to figure out how to have my install script reinstall if it fails.
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#53
Hi Rob,
I'm testing the latest version of Robo-Tank, I have a few questions:
- I've setup a Gmail e-mail as sender account, how do I test if e-mail notification works?
- Can I run at least n°2 PCA9685 expansion board? My system works on custom boards and I have n°2 I2C expansion.
- There's a way to create a kind of macro to slowly increase a PWM outlet when I turn on a DC Pump? I have a DC return pump with 0-10V speed control. My goal is to slowly increase the pump speed when I turn it on using a PWM output (with a 0-10V converter)
- Can I use GPIO4 as DHT22?
- I'm also using 2 of these board with Reef-Pi https://github.com/robertobuti/pH-Board Are they compatible with Robo-Tank?
Thank you very much!
Best regards

Simone
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#54
Hi Simone, oops I missed a button for a test email, I'll get that added for sure. For now the easiest is to setup a schedule for anything, set it to run 1 minute after you create it and have it send an email. Then you can delete the schedule.

You can run multiple pca9685, the software has one on address 64 setup by default and when it detects a new I2C address it'll prompt you and ask what you plugged in, select the pca9685 and it should work from there. On the "configure ports" screen you'll have to set the view to "Advanced" so you can see the extra ports.

My macros are called custom rules but at this time you can't adjust PWM levels with them but I like the idea of having a ramping option, maybe a user can set start and end levels and how long it should take to get there, kind of like a light mode. Sounds like you need a sensor to control the DC pump but if not you could do this using a light mode and schedules.

You can use GPIO4 for anything as long as you aren't trying to use a DS18B20 as well. If you have a DS18B20 connected you can't connect anything else. To use GPIO4 you do have to change the /boot/config.txt file, if you are unsure I can post how. With that said DHT22 doesn't work on v6.6 but I do have it working now with charts so hopefully I get the update out soon.

Sorry those pH circuits aren't compatible.

DHT22 Chart
[Image: charts5.PNG]
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#55
Hi Rob

I've updated to this version but I am still seeing multiple temp logs, also is there a way to clear all the logs at once?
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#56
Hi Hazelnutuz, the system automatically creates a chart for each DS18B20 sensor plugged in. If you unplug it the chart remains and I haven't added an option to delete it but that should be in the next update. If you want to remove a chart from the dashboard go to "charts" screen and at the top is checkbox to hide/show each chart.

At this point to clear a log you need to do it in the database. Here's how you do it.

Run phpMyAdmin to access the database.

Add /phpmyadmin/ to your Pi IP address like below.

http://192.168.1.45/phpmyadmin/

Username = root
Password  = robotank

You'll see 4 databases, the first 3 don't mess with, the robotank database is the one, click on it and it'll expand on the left side.

At the top you'll see some tables with a name similar to 00000b90e26a_C There will be 2 tables with the same name but one ends in C and the other F for Celsius and Fahrenheit. 

Click on one of them and at click the "operations" tab along the top.

At the far right side you'll see a link "Empty the table (TRUNCATE)" click and and confirm. 

Do the same for all the temp sensor tables. At some point this will be done through the interface.
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#57
(02-22-2023, 07:58 PM)Rob F Wrote: ...
If you have Chrome, right click on the page and click "inspect", a window will open in the browser. In that window there are tabs at the top, click the "console" tab. Then reload the page again, this time click and hold the refresh button and a drop down will appear. Then click "empty cache and hard reload". If it's still blank send me the info in the "console" you opened. That should tell me where it's getting stuck.
...

I just attempted an upgrade to V6.6 and get the black screen after login from both Chrome and Firefox.  Here's a screenshot of the console after the "empty cache and hard reload" operation.

   

Any help or ideas for getting this running again would be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Phil
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#58
In an effort to get this working, I tried the method that I used to upgrade to 6.1 (quite a while ago) and replaced the two occurrences of "6.1" with "6.6" to get this command
Code:
sudo wget -c https://www.robo-tank.ca/app/releases/Robo-Tank_v6_6.zip &> /dev/null && sudo unzip -o Robo-Tank_v6_6.zip -d /boot/ &> /dev/null && sudo bash /boot/robotank/install_robotank.sh

It ran to completion with various prompts and OS upgrades, etc.  Unfortunately, I get the same black screen in both Chrome and Firefox.  Here's a screenshot of the inspector console now.

   
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#59
Hi Phil, sorry for taking so long to get back to you, I was away for the long weekend.

Also sorry to hear you encountered this issue, this is happening on about 50% of installs but with some others help this should get it working again although you'll be starting fresh.

Run the following 2 commands in the SSH terminal.

sudo usermod -a -G www-data username

sudo chown -R -f www-data:www-data /var/www/html


Now you should see the login page but you likely won't be able to log in without doing the following, here's a link explaining.

https://www.robo-tank.ca/forum/thread-17...ml#pid8393

After that you should be set.
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#60
Hi Rob:
Thanks for getting back to me.  I had seen those instructions from earlier posts and tried them over the weekend.  They did get me to the point of getting the login screen, but did not help get me past the black screen.  I tried them again tonight.  The first two commands completed without issue, the SQL task, not so much.  Here's what I got.

   
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