AquaIllumination Director Beta

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   So my AI Director arrived today (I was selected to be a beta tester) in the mail, more than a month after I ordered it. I will be updating this thread with setup information, first impressions, and my overall experience as time goes by.

After removing the director from the shipping box I found it was in a box similar to that of the AI Wireless Controller but simply had a different label. The Director itself was wrapped in bubble wrap and well protected. All of the accessories needed to set it up were included as well (wifi adapter, power adapter, mounting screws, and a rubber base pad), in separate plastic bags.

Setup was fairly straight forward (plug in the wifi adapter and power and you're halfway done), until I got to the part where I needed to connect it to my wireless network (this was due to my wireless network configuration, NOT the director). I'm running an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station which does not allow WPS connections if you're using the newer versions of Airport Utility. In order to connect the Director to my network I had to download and older version of Airport Utility (5.6.1) and connect it using the "Add Wireless Clients" feature (more on how to do this can be found in this video). After figuring out how to do that, I simply had to press the top of the Director which then entered into WPS mode and quickly connected to my network.

So far I have not been able to connect my director to "MyAI" but have been able to connect to it by typing "http://director-########.local" into my browser ("########" should be replaced with the Director's serial number).

The control interface is very easy to understand and use. When you first arrive at the user interface page you will see a list of your tanks (you can arrange lights by what tanks they're over as well as how they are arranged over each tank), and tabs to navigate between the Control tab, the Layout tab, and the Effects tab.

Under the Control tab you can set timers, ramp lengths, intensities, etc. for each channel (color) your fixture has.

The layout tab is where you configure the layout of your lights over your tank. It is also where you connect to your lights by clicking the "Discover" button (your lights must be in pairing mode for the Director to "discover" them).

Lastly, you can control weather effects (clouds, storms, lightning), lunar cycles, and acclimation modes under the Effects tab. Here you can set the likelihood of clouds or lightning for each day as well as the intensity of each. You can configure the lunar cycle and coral acclimation modes here as well.

Overall I would say that AquaIllumination has finally created a superior way to control their LED lights. The interface is clean and very user-friendly, both of which are important to any control platform. I didn't like the fact that the Director does not have presets for different color temperatures/looks (14000K, 20000K, etc). The only other thing I didn't like was that I could not connect my Director to MyAI, but I'm sure AI will solve this problem with a simple software update in the near future.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to post them here. I'll keep this thread updated as changes are made to the software and the program advances.