how good is the jebao dosing pump

[Phildago]

How did you hook it up to the reef pi? Im looking to start building my reef pi soon.

Thanks

I removed the internal board and replaced with a motor drive controller. It uses pwm to control 12 v motors speed and direction. I only hooked it up in one directions as that is all I needed though.

I got 3 for 3 bucks a piece. Not a bad deal

 

[friendlyguy]

Hi there!
I thought I`d share my experience with that device.
I just received one.... and well, let me take you with me on that journey: one thing in advance... and I am expressing my personal opinion here: the software is a piece of junk the device is okayish.

You can`t do a proper calibration for several reasons. (Well thats not exactly true as I figured out later on: its mainly the translation of their manual and contra-intuitive workflows) Let me describe what I did...
I use a special accuracy weigh machine to measure the amount of rodi water I pump through it during calibration as well as an lab grade measurement cylinder to make sure none is off or I misread them by accident.

• First critic point on calibration: You cant tell the doser to pump for time amount X and then you check whats there. No, you "start" the calibration and a counter begins to show you for how long the pump has been running.
• Secondly: That very same counter updates very infrequently and if you stop the calibration in between updates I am not sure if its reflected in the counter.
• Thirdly: If you just let it run till the end (200 seconds) it stops automatically, and just when you think "now I have at least a accurate time and can map an amount of liquid to it": No, you can`t.
  Because you are not allowed to enter values above 100 ml. However the Doser dosed 130ml within that timeframe.
• n-thly: You cannot enter accurate amounts of liquid that you measured during calibration. The most precise it can get is a multiple of 10ml!

When I did my testing I asked it to dose 5ml, 10ml and 50ml.
Since the minimum increment is 10ml, I decided not to include decimals.
5ml requested, results are: 7ml, 7ml, 7ml ~40% off
10ml requested, results are: 15 ml, 15ml, 15ml ~50% off
50ml requested, results are: 76 ml, 76ml, 76ml again ~50% off

So the deviation is quiet constant and when I manually apply those "offsets" to my schedule I get fairly accurate doses.
For example if I want it to dose 5ml I enter 3ml (5*0,6): works. But I don`t want to always remember the correction factor and have "wrong" doses in my schedule.

The next idea I had was to apply that measurement (130ml in 200s) to random times that this calibration joke displays.
Tried to stop the calibration somewhere in the 100s range: 107s -> 70ml. (69,55 so... close enough)

Testing again: 5ml...: 7,6ml 7,8ml 7,5ml. ~53% off. So I decided to use that as correction factor on the 70ml: 70*1,53= 107,1 = 100 (max) ml and put that into the joke.
And I again got 7ml, something. What the heck. Does this thingy in the end of the day just ignores what I put in there?

At this point I began wondering myself if there is something essentially wrong with the manual. And in fact I figured out that there is an essential "flaw": the translation of the manual into german. When I found the english manual and compared it to the german one I spotted one major difference.
The german manual says: Its better to calibrate the doser with a higher amount of liquid, 100ml for maximum precision. (..."4. Bei Liquid (ml) einen wert zwischen 10 und 100 eingeben, je höher desto genauer ist das Ergebnis"...)
However, the english manual says to choose an amount that is the closest to what you are looking for to dose. (..."The closer the calibration volume is to the actual dosing liquid volume, the more accurate the actual dosing liquid volume will be."...)
So in my case, wanting to dose amounts 1-10ml the closest is 10ml and not 100ml.
Another big mistake I personally made is:
I understood that I have to run the pump for time amount x and then you tell the calibration how much liquid was dosed. (thats what I am used to from ghl dosers for example)
But its actually the other way around: You tell the device you are going to calibrate it to an amount x and then start the calibration and then you need to stop it once it dosed that amount... (which automatically introduces errors because of reaction times and communication delays btw.)
So thats why it didnt have any effect if i changed the value of the amount that "was" dosed.

After I figured out those quirks I am able to dose accurate enough amounts: 5ml are 5,3- 5.5 ml, 3ml are 3,2-3,4 ml. Didn't bother to test the higher amounts as its not what I calibrated the doser for and not what I need.
I use it in a 50g frag tank to dose all for reef, no3+po4 as well as the firstbite copepod suspension.

A few points I dont understand, and why I call the software "junk": there are various improvements one could have implemented, but they just didnt:
- They could have implemented a function to name the pumps or enter a description.
- They could have implemented a function to track what was dosed in the past. Wouldn`t it be nice to look back after a year and determine how much you raised your dose within a couple of months to interpolate something like an expected increased dose.
- They could have implemented a function to monitor the amount of liquid that is left in your dosing containers or bottles or whatever.
- They could have implemented a function to manually dose amount X.
- Reoccuring Doses based on weekdays.
- No Warning / alert functions if a device is offline
- Less than optimal design of the application. Warnings only get displayed for a very short amount of time, tiny buttons blablabla...and so on.

The complete software feels like they fed what they had from their "old dosers" (the ones that you had to control via a lcd and a couple of buttons) into a crosscompiler and used that same program / logic for their new pumps.
Yes, the doser is "cheap" compared to other products but thats all just software changes, no additional hardware required: The device has a network interface already, you MUST create an account with their cloud, the device "knows" how much is/ was dosed every day. Some basic calculations really could do the trick...