This automatic fish feeder didn’t take long to put together and it allows you to adjust how much food is dispensed. [Gagandeep Singh] built it around an Atmel AT89C2051 microcontroller. Like many of the automated feeding systems we see, this uses a character display and a few buttons for the user interface. We’re always curious at how they mechanically dispense the food. In this case, the motor seen at the left pulls open a sliding baffle which is pulled closed again by rubber bands at the right. It’s a bit more involved than the last fish feeder we saw, but your guess is as good as ours on which system works better.
So i’d imagine this only works for pellet food. I wonder if he has had problems with it jamming
I suppose another way you could construct the dispenser would be to have a rotating disk assembly
Usually fish food is pretty dry and somewhat hygroscopic. Does the feeder get clogged?
It doesn’t have enough colored wires! :)
I have a feeder. It’s quite simple, really. It has a rotating drum with an adjustable slot. It spins and dispenses the dry food in 12 or 24 hr intervals. Displays are overkill, i think.
When is a display ever overkill! The more displays and usless graphics, the better!
@Ryan Finch
could you show your design please your feeder sounds like what I’m looking for.
thnx, Edward5
the one I bought at the pet store is just a disk with a tube running through it stuck on a lamp timer type contraption, the tube is slit so as it turns it scoops up some food and when it rolls around it dumps
@Ryan Finch
That sounds a bit like the automatic wood-pellet controllers for a heater-unit for water and house-warming. I know a few people who has this, and it would work best with food-pellets I guess ?
It would be the best system for feeding fish I can think of.
Where can I get some automatic fish? Because those sound like the ones you don’t need to feed.
When I was studying fisheries science we toured a trout farm. They used a flower shaped electric clock as an automatic feeder the pellets were placed on each petal and when the hour hand got to there it pushed the pellets into the water.
@Edward5,
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=automatic+fish+feeder
Look at Google images, look at shopping, there are a lot of designs. The one I bought a while ago consisted of a plastic housing containing a clock mechanism with a drum affixed to the hour hand. Inside the drum was a tube with a hole in the side acting as an intake, and the opposite end was open to dump into the tank. As it rotated twice daily, the intake hole scooped up some food, and the outlet dumped it into the tank about 6 hours later.
It was kind of tricky to set the appropriate amount of food and still have confidence that you weren’t going to starve the critters.
We solved all those problems when we gave the aquarium away to a nephew. :-)
This design is flawed. This will so fuck up after 1-2 weeks of usage.
First of all he built it into a carton box instead of wood or aluminium. What’s that tons of fat cables, his using 10A capable wires lol and he should’ve made a rail for the moving parts.
Haku-
You might want to consider building an automatic fish catcher:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4204355.html
I was certain that this was titled ‘Atomic fish feeder’ …
@ kirov, Nick McClanahan
No the food does not get stuch because of the shape of the sliding hole. It has triangle shape orifice and when its getting closed it pushes the food aside. Ill try to upload the video with food despencing…:)
@Ryan Finch
what you are saying is good but it has limitation.
I wanted adjustable amount and also it has one added feture.
when feeding is done then it triggers a relay which stops the air pump in aqurium for 30 mins so that wishis can have there meal in peace.
Seems like someone had fun with knotting those cables :D
BTW is it possible to get a part-list and the sourcecode for this?
thx
Di you notise that the clock stops while feeding … starting feeding at 11:11:00, was feeding for about 25 seconds and then starts the time at 11:11:01
@Hammerhead : part list is as follow
1)4001 rectifing diodes
2)7850 voltage regulator
3)1000mf rectifing capacitor
4)ATmel 89c2051 microcontoller
5) 11.0592 crystal
6)2 ceramic capacitor, 10K resistor, cap for micro
7)1 100k pot for lcd contrast
8)buffer ic
9) Micro relay
10)geared toy motor
11) limit switch ( made by using that aluminium slit and a guiding screw )
for code please send me a test mail at gaganchd2000@gmail.com. ill send you both text and hex file
@ Birgir Thor
Nice observation. I think you are right. I used Timer T0,T1 and made RTC of it. i think i missed to update the display registers while feeding. Thanks for the comment.
@ FISHFACE :
thanks for you comment. this is just a hobby project which i made in a week. and those cables are looking mammoth in pics but are not that bulky actually. i am using 8 pin connector cable. and i also like that knotting of wire which i once saw in my friend project in college.
@ Hammerhead
mailed you the code for this. there is comment in the code please edit it. also there is one bug which i noticed from above comments. while feeding the RTC stops . need to fix that also…
My contact:
osquadrados@gmail.com