What is it?

"Kraken" is the bare, un-soldered version of Leviathan- a tiny circuit board that will allow you to easily monitor & control nearly every aspect of your aquarium. For a pre-soldered & assembled version, check out my Leviathan board listing.

It seamlessly pairs with the open-source Reef-Pi software running on a Raspberry Pi. Don't just take my word for it though, Leviathan has been featured by multiple aquarium & electronic sites!

Features

Kraken comes with all the routing & mounting holes necessary to build a fully-functional Leviathan board. It's a great option to save some money & assemble the board on your own!

All current features of Reef Pi 3.2 are compatible with Leviathan, including:

• Equipment control- 12 dedicated GPIO channels for equipment outlet control (via 5V relay boards)
• Lighting cycles- 4 independent lighting control channels for controlling spectrum & intensity on LED lighting such as Kessils
• pH monitoring input- Input for pH interface over I2C Line (Check out ML Reefkeeping's Isolated pH Interface, my recommended connector)
• Dosing pump control- 4 variable 12V outputs. Can be used to control 4 12V peristaltic dosing pumps in one direction, or 2 dosing pumps in forward & reverse
• Temperature monitoring & control- 3 channels for monitoring multiple temperate zones
• Auto top-off & water level monitoring- 2 channels of mechanical float switch input & 2 channels of optical water level sensor input
• 3 independent power inputs: 12V, 10V, & 5V. These will route power everywhere it is needed, including to the Raspberry Pi

Why did you make it?

Have you ever wanted to automate your aquarium without paying the $800+ price that the most popular systems on the market sell for? Me too! I knew there had to be a better way. I wanted to capture all the possible features in the tiniest form-factor possible. This led me to create Leviathan!

Creating Reef-Pi builds from scratch can be very tedious, resulting in dozens of hours of soldering individual jumper wires & troubleshooting the resulting wire nest.

It's also relatively expensive, requiring multiple proto-boards & purchases of single components. Kraken throws all that out the window by combining every connection on a single, affordable board to use every available Reef-Pi control feature! After soldering on the components, all you have to do is plug in your sensors, pumps, lights, etc. Give it power, a Raspberry Pi running the free, open-source Reef-Pi software, & you're good to go!

I originally only made Leviathan for myself. But after years of tweaks, improvements, & polishing, I wound up with something that was too good not to share! I started a Kickstarter campaign for it with a goal of $1,250 & well, it wound up being far more popular than I could have imagined!

Unfortunately, Kickstarter campaigns are short-lived by nature. Now that I have well over 100 Leviathan boards out working in the wild after that 30 day whirlwind, I feel confident saying you'll be happy with yours!

Not only do you get the Kraken board itself, but you'll get the extensive documentation with detailed step-by-step guides for hooking up your board, setting up the Reef-Pi software, & using it to automate your aquarium.

This isn't some fly-by-night board with 2 pages of notes on the MHz frequency of the LED driver chip, a vague reference to jumpers, & a short blurb telling you to plug it in & hope for the best. My goal with the documentation was to be detailed enough that anyone with no electronics experience whatsoever could get it running with no surprises.

Plus, you'll also receive 3D printable files for custom fit enclosures & sensor brackets to combine with your board. You're always free to build your own, like many people have. But if you've got access to a 3D printer, why re-invent the wheel?

All that being said, if you do have questions, I'm always available to help! Plus, Reef2Reef has an extremely active Reef-Pi community that will likely answer questions way faster than I possibly can.