Ok all...I am going to help fill in the holes in this conversation. I am at MACNA and spoke with the Mindstream folks, and saw the unit, for about 45 minutes. I also own a ReefBot.
The size of this unit is about 20% larger than a baseball in diameter...about the size of a softball. It has two parts, the part that is in the tank or sump and the part that is on the outside. The outside part has to be dry and will connect to your wifi. The disk kind of looks like the old film viewers we all used to play with as kids (if you are over 50 LOL). The paper round disk you put in a viewer, looked through it and then pushed down on the lever to go to the next slide. It slowly spins.
On the inside, there are a few lenses that are used to read the results. They are about the size of of pencil erasure. The disk is covered by a plate so the disk can spin freely without any hitchhikers. In earlier designs, I was told by one of the engineers that a snail caused the reading to be out of wack due to the imbalance and weight as the disk was spinning. Wonder how long that took to happen and then find
. There is a small brush that on the disk to keep the lenses clean as it spins.
The inside and outside clamp together with a magnet for up to a 3/4" thickness material. It is like a powerhead sort of clamping.
The tests are sent to the cloud every 15 minutes. The tests include KH, Ca, Mg, Salinity, Temp, Oxygen, Potassium, Ph, C02, Ammonia. They hope to be adding Phosphate down the road. Nitrate won't be happening any time soon and may not happen. Nitrate is apparently very hard to measure in saltwater with this sort of technology.
The long term plan is to hopefully have this device connect to other devices and/or controllers. This device does not control anything. It is only a monitor. It will capture the results and you can look at the graphs of each element on your phone app or on a browser on your PC.
As for a comparison to the ReefBot, it is similar but different. I have a ReefBot and have been using it for about 3 months now. The Reefbot depends on liquid based, off the shelf test kits. You have to get tank water and RO for testing and then the robot automates the testing process using the test kits. It then dumps the tank water and rinsing water in to a waste container or drain. The results are sent to the cloud for view on the phone app or web browser. The ReefBot does not make a test kit more accurate in of itself, it only makes the test kit as accurate as the test kit is capable. There is one test that the Reefbot can test for that is not on the Mindstream now - phosphate. Hopefully there will be other test kits down the road that will be compatible to test other elements...like strontium, iron, copper etc...that are liquid only based.
Reef Kinetics launched two new products at MACNA...a testing system for stores as well as opened their API for integration with other systems. This means programmers can now access the test results and program controllers to do other functions...like dosing. Also, Reef Kinetics showed a new doser that will be coming out later this year or next.
There is a limitation of the # of tests with the ReefBot due to the vial size...20ml. However, they will be announcing a 40ml and a 10ml bottle. Some tests use very little reagent while others use a lot. These other bottles will give them more flexibility. Also, it only holds 8 vials. Some tests use 1 or 2 vials and others need 3. Therefore you are limited in the number of tests capable with the Reefbot without changing out the vials.
Finally, there is the newer technology around ion based testing with probes. These products are the ION Director (GHL), and the Xepta aBex from Spain to be sold by CoralVue. These new technologies use a probe that will need to be calibrated on every test using special saltwater that has a certain ion concentration. While there is no "reagent" so to speak, you will need to have a place to store the calibration fluids. The Xepta will require both the KH tester (using a Ph probe and reagant) and the other probe box...you can't separate them. The other probe box has a large probe holder that holds multiple probes, at the same time, that is testing all elements at the same time. The aBex system will test for KH, Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium, Sodium and Nitrates. GHL has not announced much yet on the ION Director...but they are supposed to do a showing at ReefAPalooza in Chicago in October.
They are selling the Mindstream for a big discount at MACNA and I am personally on the fence on putting the money down. I have a few days to decide to take advantage of the $300 savings
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