AqLeds is a project started by Alvaro Atencia, and Miguel Ángel Ajo. We are both passionate about technology and nature, Alvaro specially passionate about aquarism, and Miguel Ángel about engineering.

Alvaro had started some experiments on LED lighting for aquarium plants, with very good results on properly chosen leds, and he had started an online LED lighting shop. At that time, I was running my little enginering company (NBEE), and we decided to run a joint venture to start this project.

A venture for what?, well, for AqLeds, we wanted something programmable and open, which allowed for natural light cycles on the plants, using almost any kind of LED lamps available in the market (we even designed a set of modular lamps), proprietary solutions locked you into expensive LED lamps, and also were either quite expensive, or crappy designed.

Things turned to go slower than we wanted, we had one prototype which is still running on Alvaro’s aquariums, it had a fancy OLED screen, an aluminium box design, a capacitive touch control front panel. It worked very well, but it was a bit over engineered, and when we looked into the manufacturing budget, it was too high. So we took an step back, no OLED, no aluminium box, no touch screen, something simple, still delivering the power we wanted.

And this is where we are, an opensource 3 channel LED controller, capable of smothly delivering 100W per channel during ‘sunrise’, ‘day’, ‘sunset’, and ‘night’

We chose to open the project, because we really believe, that all together we can do it better, there are many things we can do yet:

  • Longitude / Latitude tracking for lighting.
  • Plant cycle induction
  • Open API to make any other use via USB.