Aqua Illumination AI Director LED Wireless Control Platform

April 21, 2014 Update: I wish I had never bought this. I turned up the brightness so that I could see inside the tank while cleaning it and now the director will not connect and so I can't change the light settings back without setting it to fully manual. I've tried resetting it by clicking the button... nothing. I've tried resetting it by unplugging it for several minutes and then plugging it back in. The LED blinks red meaning that it is searching for an access point, then goes solid red meaning that it is broadcasting its own signal. My laptop sees the signal for a brief moment, but then it disappears. It is such a struggle to get this thing to work sometimes, not always, but sometimes. I'll never buy anything from Aquaillumination again... ever.****I am pretty disappointed in my director. It does the bread and butter beautifully; creating a light program that lets you customize the intensity of each color option in your set-up over a 24hr loop. I love my Hydra and the spectrum options. I think the coral acclimation option also works well. What it doesn't do very well is almost everything else.The global weather option does not work at all. It doesn't matter what I search for, I always get two responses back, one in the Mediterranean and one off South America. The tech service, which is available only by email, suggested that I may have a browser caching issue and to not use IE. I'd like to believe that, even though I get the same result from my iPhone app. So I try it on Firefox and same result. It doesn't really come with an instruction manual, rather just a sort of quick-start guide. The lack thorough reading materials might not have been that big of a deal if my director had worked as clearly as the quick-start would lead you to expect. I tried setting it up the first night with my iphone, which worked perfectly well as far as setting up the network connection. However the iphone app itself returned an error message when attempting to register, saying my serial number was invalid. Given that the AI site gives only an email address for tech support, I fire off an email about the app. The next day I try again, but this time no LED. Again, another email. Turns out there is a known problem with the power cable and they have to ship me another one. Separately, there seems to be a considerable lag between when you change the cloud effect or lightning settings in the iPhone app and when it actually starts to happen. Those work by use of a probably setting and an intensity setting and every 15 minutes or so the program rolls the dice based on the probability given. One would think that setting the lightning to 100% probability would mean that you'd get to see some lightning within 15-30 minutes. Likewise, if the lightning is tuned on at a high probability and you change it to 0%, the lightning should stop within 15 minutes or so. No on both accounts. Changes in these special settings via an iPhone can take hours and hours to take effect. Logging in with my laptop seems to have a faster effect, though I'm not sure I'd say immediate. If you have to unplug it for some reason and are having trouble getting it to connect again, check in at youtube, AI seemingly keeps all of their instruction videos on Youtube. Good to know, since I didn't see any note to that effect on the AI site the first few things that I struggled with.Long story short, I like the spectrum of the Hydra and the ease with which you can program the 24hr cycle, but I can't get the weather to work and the rest of the perks don't seem quite as sharp as I'd expect of a high-end product.

This item needs to be within 10 feet of the light to work correctly or it looses connection to easy.

I returned mine. Had too many connection issues. Went back to T5s and added stunner strips.

Bought this to go with my two (2) AI Hydra 52's. Works perfectly, and was super easy to set up!

this is a must have if u have purchased the lights.

Exelenre

A must have with the Hydra 26 or 52! The programming options for the lights this thing controls are great! I love watching the ramp down and up as well as the weather replicating feature for areas around the globe. It simulates lightning, clouds moving and moonlight absolutely perfect! I plan on purchasing a few more lights for my other tanks too as this can handle them all!

customer support and product are sub par