AI Vega Color/Blue Owners Thread!

[Kansas_REEF90]

I did see the director software live at MACNA and it is very nice and easy to use. The AI guys had it running on a Mac and were controlling 13 different lights with the program. They did not have a release date, but said soon. The visual interface on the Mac looks very clean and easy to use. I cannot wait to try this out on my tank.

[qfrisco]

Quick MACNA update:

I spent some time at the AI booth yesterday, talking to a few of their folks including their president, Chris Clough.

- regarding the Director - as has been mentioned here, it is a separate hardware unit (not software). It basically acts as a bridge between a Wifi network and the proprietary wireless network used by the Vegas. The Director has a built-in webserver on it, which then allows it to be accessed from any device using a web browser.

No pricing or availability was announced, but I got the impression it would be $129. Availability was "soon".

I talked to Chris about the thinking behind having a separate hardware unit for this, and he said although he knows this will be disappointing to some, that there is still a good-sized market for people who will be perfectly happy with just the controller and will not want to do all the tweaking possible on the Director. I have to say I agree with him, except that I already know I'll be one of the ones wanting the Director, which means more $$$!

The Director replaces the Controller completely, so after the Director comes out, I'm sure there will be lots of used controllers going up for sale.

Control-wise, there is no ability to model a specific color temperature with the Director. For example, say you wanted a 14000K look, you can't just set that and the Director automatically figure things out. Chris said they decided against that because it gets pretty complicated calculating color temperatures across a variety of LED colors. My guess is that this would get even more complicated when custom pucks are available. Moreover, Chris said accuracy is all in question anyway, as standard colorimeters can have a pretty large error range. He said their experience was that bulbs that advertise themselves as having a specific color temperature, could actually be off by a few thousand Ks depending on the colorimeter used, and that this could just cause more confusion. They think most people would rather set color temperature by eye.

Color intensity curves for each LED are completely programmable over time, which is cool. There is also a cool weather feature that automatically matches the simulated weather to the weather in your zip code, i.e., cloudy if it's cloudy outside, stormy if it's stormy, etc. Cool, more than anything, but I'm sure the livestock won't really care.

- the Vegas they were demoing had pucks with UV LEDs on them, but I didn't think to ask which brand. This should make some folks happy. No availability dates (other than "soon") were announced for custom pucks.

- new controller firmware is in the works. The latest release has been frozen and is currently undergoing testing. Expect to see it "in a couple weeks".

- for my setup specifically, a 25" high 90g with the Vegas 9" above the water, Chris thought that might be too high to get good PAR, and suggested I lower to between 4"-6" AWL. He said they designed the Vegas to be much lower to the water than the Sols, and that with the lights that high (and with the 80 degree optics on the Vega), I'm losing out on getting the light that reflects back inwards from the glass.

Hope that helps!

[Skipponator]

Originally Posted by qfrisco

Quick MACNA update:

I spent some time at the AI booth yesterday, talking to a few of their folks including their president, Chris Clough.

- regarding the Director - as has been mentioned here, it is a separate hardware unit (not software). It basically acts as a bridge between a Wifi network and the proprietary wireless network used by the Vegas. The Director has a built-in webserver on it, which then allows it to be accessed from any device using a web browser.

No pricing or availability was announced, but I got the impression it would be $129. Availability was "soon".

I talked to Chris about the thinking behind having a separate hardware unit for this, and he said although he knows this will be disappointing to some, that there is still a good-sized market for people who will be perfectly happy with just the controller and will not want to do all the tweaking possible on the Director. I have to say I agree with him, except that I already know I'll be one of the ones wanting the Director, which means more $$$!

The Director replaces the Controller completely, so after the Director comes out, I'm sure there will be lots of used controllers going up for sale.

Control-wise, there is no ability to model a specific color temperature with the Director. For example, say you wanted a 14000K look, you can't just set that and the Director automatically figure things out. Chris said they decided against that because it gets pretty complicated calculating color temperatures across a variety of LED colors. My guess is that this would get even more complicated when custom pucks are available. Moreover, Chris said accuracy is all in question anyway, as standard colorimeters can have a pretty large error range. He said their experience was that bulbs that advertise themselves as having a specific color temperature, could actually be off by a few thousand Ks depending on the colorimeter used, and that this could just cause more confusion. They think most people would rather set color temperature by eye.

Color intensity curves for each LED are completely programmable over time, which is cool. There is also a cool weather feature that automatically matches the simulated weather to the weather in your zip code, i.e., cloudy if it's cloudy outside, stormy if it's stormy, etc. Cool, more than anything, but I'm sure the livestock won't really care.

- the Vegas they were demoing had pucks with UV LEDs on them, but I didn't think to ask which brand. This should make some folks happy. No availability dates (other than "soon") were announced for custom pucks.

- new controller firmware is in the works. The latest release has been frozen and is currently undergoing testing. Expect to see it "in a couple weeks".

- for my setup specifically, a 25" high 90g with the Vegas 9" above the water, Chris thought that might be too high to get good PAR, and suggested I lower to between 4"-6" AWL. He said they designed the Vegas to be much lower to the water than the Sols, and that with the lights that high (and with the 80 degree optics on the Vega), I'm losing out on getting the light that reflects back inwards from the glass.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for filling us in, I am excited for the power puck options and hopefully soon, is just that. Good to know about the Vega height, I am sitting 9" off, and will lower it slightly to see what that'll do.

[Hooked4life]

Nice report qfrisco - thanks for the info!

[bnumair]

I talked to AI guys at MACNA on saturday and they told me pretty much everything mention already by other people here but once thing i was told was director had a release expected in Jan 2013.

[bezlar]

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Have to say I love them so far. Colors better, shimmer better, than the cheap Chinese lights I had. Much more warm looking kinda like looking at plasma compared to led. Controller worked fine out of box.

[bezlar]

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[bezlar]

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[bezlar]

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[cbonito]

Ok, so what I am gathering here from what I see is that the Vega can produce a much "whiter" light than the Sol. They do indeed look nice.

I'm going to stick with my Sol though since I can add a small bar on either side of it with maybe a green, red and uv on each side and run the sol and the aux LEDs all on my RKE ALC module. Can't do that with the vega.

Thanks to everyone who posted. They're cool lights.

[Skipponator]

I am really enjoying mine thus far. However, after reading about lowering the lights, I did from 9", and sitting about 7" now(I'll lower more next week) and the disco got worse. So I suspect the lower one goes, the worse it gets..

[SteveWong]

Belzar:

Can you elaborate on what mix of colors you have? Also, what is your tank size/height, and do you get much disco effect? I like the colors you're getting. Mine is looking quite good now.

AI support suggested that I try lowering the lights to around 7-8" and turn all the intensities to 100% -- that intensity on my tank worsens the multicolor effect, so I've left them at white 100%, red and green 50% and the others 80%. I might bump the others to 90 % but at 100% I found the hue too purple/blue for my tastes. Increasing the red/green colors seem to increase the multicolor effects.

They also suggested reducing the surface agitation, and I'll look into it, but I do prefer lots of surface agitation to oxygenate etc.

[Skipponator]

Originally Posted by SteveWong

They also suggested reducing the surface agitation, and I'll look into it, but I do prefer lots of surface agitation to oxygenate etc.

Remember, the skimmer will oxygenate the water many times over than any surface agitation ever could. Surface agitation is more of a must during power outages, and unless you have a backup powersource, it doesn't matter anyways if your doing surface agitation.

[qfrisco]

Originally Posted by Skipponator

I am really enjoying mine thus far. However, after reading about lowering the lights, I did from 9", and sitting about 7" now(I'll lower more next week) and the disco got worse. So I suspect the lower one goes, the worse it gets..

Thinking about it, I guess that makes sense that the discrete shimmer would get worse as you lower the lights since the distance between LEDs is greater relative to the distance of the LEDs from the water surface. Maybe the fact that AI designed the Vegas to sit lower to the water than the Sols makes them more susceptible to producing the "disco effect" because they sit closer to the water.

In general, as I've mentioned in the past, we should never expect that the "disco effect" will ever go away with LEDs because there will always be several points of light in an LED fixture, and now having different colored LEDs (reds and greens) just makes it worse. We can only expect to lessen the effect by clustering the LEDs as tightly as possible. The Kessils, for example, have really minimal "disco effect" because of how tightly the LEDs are clustered, but it's still there.

The king of shimmer is still metal halides, and will probably always be that way!

[charged]

What excactly is the "Disco Effect"? Does this happen w/all LED;s?

[qfrisco]

Originally Posted by charged

What excactly is the "Disco Effect"? Does this happen w/all LED;s?

If you're familiar with the shimmer caused by a single-point light source (could be a metal halide bulb, or the sun), the "disco effect" is basically multiple shimmer lines made more visually apparent because of the difference in color of the light source causing a difference in color between the resulting shimmer lines.

For example, go to any swimming pool on a sunny day and check out the shimmer on the bottom of the pool - gorgeous!. Now imagine we had two suns in our solar system :-), each separated by a good distance from each other. Both suns would create shimmer on the bottom of the pool, but you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the shimmers if both suns had the same color.

Now imagine both suns have different, contrasting colors - say one is red and the other green. Now you'd really be able to tell which shimmer lines are caused by which sun, as the red sun would cause a reddish shimmer, and the green sun would cause a greenish shimmer. This is what people refer to as the "disco effect".

The same exact thing happens with LED lights. As long as all LEDs are the same color, all shimmer lines would look the same. But if we have LEDs of different colors, with each causing its own shimmer lines, we would have shimmer lines of different colors, i.e., "disco effect".

This effect will happen with any light source (not just LEDs), and the effect becomes greater the more contrasting the light sources' colors are (making them more obvious to the eye) and the more further apart the lights are from each other. I mention in the previous post that the Kessils have minimal shimmer because of how densely they have packed the LEDs into their fixture.

Hope that helps!

[malady]

reef builders shows some director screen shots
!!!

http://tiny.cc/1g8jlw

a little unsure If i want one since I only have one light in my room but still cool none the less

[kajung2k]

the director looks pretty awesome. Though I wish they would have built-in WIFI to the vega so it could connect to the cloud, or even better.. build in the director software into the vega so we can access it on our local machines via HTTP. This way its agnostic to apple, pc's, all handhelds etc..

Everyone wants money.. I understand.. I too want money.. --- though if they would have built-it in I would have been happier, even paying maybe $100.00 more.

[Skipponator]

So, I just went and changed my return lines to create little to no surface agitation, and the disco effect is nearly gone. It almost matches me T5s currently. So, simply play with your desired surface agitation for a desired shimmer. If your hosting a 70s themed party, than stir it up!

[bezlar]

I have disco but think it kinda looks cool. From a distance the shimmer is great and the disco just blends in. I have the color and all lights set at 80%. It looks warm in color. It doesn't look super bright like my cheap Chinese LEDs but the color of the rock and corals is so much better. Tank is a 60x26x28. I have very little surface agitation. I let my tunze move water deep, and my sump and skimmer to oxygenate to water.

[Ledo]

For divers, some little disco can sounds very familiar.

For me, the best of MH is their shimmer.

So, I really hope to see some in my Vega.

[qfrisco]

I'm with @Ledo - the disco doesn't bother me too much, and I like the shimmer. It's the one thing I missed when I switched from MHs to T5s.

[Hooked4life]

I took PAR readings for those interested in the output of this light. I don't have water in my tank, so all are AWL readings.

Readings are at 14"/18"/24" from bottom of light, directly under center. All LEDS at % indicated.

100% - 655/402/260
90% - 603/373/239
80% - 545/340/216
70% - 486/292/200
60% - 422/253/175
50% - 358/215/150
40% - 293/175/122
30% - 223/133/94
20% - 150/90/63
10% - 77/46/33

[Mcbeezus]

how much does water effect the par?

[DloG]

Originally Posted by Mcbeezus

how much does water effect the par?

I'm interested in knowing too...
I'm guessing that it would be a lot less.