[OlegZero] has some pet fish in his basement, and decided to work on a little project for them — an aquarium light that mimics the outdoors. He calls it the FishLight project.
His goal was to create a light panel that could imitate the color of the outdoor sky (approximately) using an RGB LED strip. During normal operation, the LEDs cycle through the colors of day, from dusk to dawn using an ATmega88 microcontroller. After his girlfriend saw what it could do, she quickly came up with the idea to add a cityscape to the background to turn it into a piece of attractive decor for their home.
Still fail to see the point of going to this much effort for a few fish? Well, besides it turning into a rather nice artistic light for their basement, the concept can be applied to other animals as well. Like encouraging chickens to produce more eggs by making the days “longer” with artificial light. As it turns out chickens produce less eggs when the days get shorter — an easy fix with something like this!
Cool build, but now you have me thinking about the possibility of training chickens to operate on 12 hour “days” to get even more egg output using this kind of tech!!
“Fewer” eggs, not “less”. If it can be counted, use “fewer”. If not, use “less”.
I’m a scrambled eggs guy myself. Put that in your bowl and count it!
I C what he did there.
Sweet! I’ve been meaning to do this (sans cityscape projection) for some time now. Some fish like neon tetras require a ‘sunrise’ to breed, which can be troublesome when your tank is deep indoors.