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Mindstream Aquarium Monitor


FarmerTy

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Yes and the real mind blowing part besides eliminating the need for constant calibration of probes like Calcium is the idea that they also have plans to integrate their device with other aquarium products (e.g. controllers) to provide a complete monitoring and control system. Hook this baby up with an Apex and you coukld control everything with total accuracy from anywhere. Next step would be to have Diver's Den drone drop fish right into the aquarium >~)))laugh.png>

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They sure do have a lot of people working on the project. If they've got enough money to fund all the patent lawyers, PhD's and chief executives maybe they are on to something. I'll grumble with skepticism until I get my hands on one. It just seems too good to be true.

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Whoa! Threads merged. Hadn't seen this thread previously and just heard about this today. Looks like it just uses various different light sources to measure things. I'm having a hard time understanding how that will work for things like alk if there is no reagent used or chemical reaction. I'll admit, I'm educated, but no chemist. I understood that things like bicarbonate could only be measured via a chemical reaction. Even if the final result is assigned a value based on a spectrographic reading, some sort of reaction has to take place yes? I guess I wasn't aware that each of the elements or compounds the device claims to test could simply be read by light attenuation alone without any sort of reaction taking place

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At the proposed price I don't care if it's legit, accurate, precise, long lasting, or able to interface with the apex. Too expensive. I'll run a Red Sea test every couple weeks and save myself $600

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Little bit more info.

So looking like it'll be in the $700 range, and around $50 per disk that is estimated to be accurate for a month or more.

http://reefbuilders.com/2015/07/29/answers-top-10-questions-mindstream/

Their kickstarter page.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/859739753/mindstream-aquarium-monitor?ref=nav_search

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  • 1 month later...

It really is a cool concept but at that price point it's just not practical. It's limited to the top 1% of the top 1% of reefers out there.

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That's too bad. Sure it was expensive, but considering how much money some of us put into livestock in our tanks, I think it would be worth it. I travel a lot for work and if I was able to see my alk levels while away from home, I could make the necessary adjustments to my CaRX through my Apex to prevent an alk spike. I battled swinging alk a lot last year when traveling and it cost me enough coral to pay for one of these monitors, and it definitely would have been worth it to have one while my CaRX was on the fritz.

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I am still having trouble with how they were planning on getting accurate results for that price, I mean I am pretty sure you could do it with an ion specific chromatograph but one of those for a single parameter is rediculously expensive. I am struggling to see what they could be doing that utilizes flourescence and a consumable disk to achieve the reading. I guess they could be keeping reagents in the disk that are metered out slowly and then it works similar to a Hanna but I am still somewhat concerned with accuracy and repeatability. I guess I just feel that it is almost to good to be true in my mind but I would love to be pleasantly surprise should they manage to get it on the market.

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This is my understanding from their presentation at MACNA:

There are no reagents in the system. Temp, PH, and salinity are measured using probes. For other measurements except alk the disk has strips that are flourescent when run across blue diodes. They have sensors that measure voltages associated with photoemissions on 15 spots across each strip. The raw voltage information is fed to the cloud where calculations are done on the backend using calibration info stored for your specific disk, which has an rfid tag. These calculations result in the reading you will see. Alk is calculated using a formula based on CO2 and other things. IF there is significant variation in the 15 samples taken for a given metric then they report an error. Sometimes this can be corrected by cleaning the disk. Sometimes the disk is just worn out. They think they can reliably get 30 days before wearout begins. There are also little brushes that wipe off biofilm as the disk rotates.

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I like the idea and amazed by the science behind it... The price will make me never buy it.

That's great that it tests it so many times per day but I don't need that. I need a once/day and I'll be happy.... If they can put out a cheaper version, with longer lasting discs, I'm game.

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Yeah, their target audience is reefers who want to see continuous trends and look for correlations between metrics over time. It's appealing to some of us, but cost prohibitive unless fully proven :)

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