Fish are easy to keep as pets, requiring little more than regular feeding to keep them happy in the short-to-medium term. If you’re going on holiday, it can be nice to know that your pets are being taken care of, but finding someone to take on the chore can be hard. [Trevor_DIY] doesn’t need to worry about that, however – he’s built an automatic feeder to handle the job.
The build uses an Arduino Uno as the brains, with the only additional hardware required being a stepper motor and driver. The stepper motor drives a 3D printed wheel, with 14 slots – each one holding one meal for the fish. This allows the feeder to deliver two meals a day for a full week before requiring attention.
The feeder is configured to feed a breakfast meal, then a dinner meal 8 hours later, and then wait 16 hours before breakfast comes around again. Rather than use a real-time clock, this is simply handled with the Arduino’s built in delay function. While it isn’t super accurate, this should be close enough over a week to keep the fish alive. We’d be interested as to just how far it drifts over time.
Overall, it’s a quick and tidy way to keep the pets going without a lot of fuss. Pet feeders are a popular project, as they solve a common problem faced by owners the world over; this one can even handle wet cat food. Video after the break.
People complaining that the shown tank is too small to keep fish in it in 3… 2… 1…
Well, depending on the type of fish it can either be of a semi decent size, or way way too tiny.
Generally speaking, a fish bowl isn’t a good aquarium.
And the fact that the ecosystem in a small aquarium is far more sensitive then what a larger aquarium is, then this could lead to the fish suffering from everything from water toxicity, to simply too little oxygen in the water.
In the end, one shouldn’t keep fish in a bowl, or even a small aquarium. (Though, both tends to exist due to people either thinking fish bowls are how one is supposed to keep fish, or the fact that most people new to aquariums have the misconception that smaller aquariums are easier to keep clean. (A sufficiently large aquarium is nearly self cleaning per say, not to mention needing far less attention…))
That jar is too small! The fish will die before getting hungry.
I’m presuming that you’re thinking is that it will die of thirst?
That’s pretty nifty. Combine that with an automatic irrigation system for your plants and you’re good to go!
Now all we need is the Jetson’s RoboMaid.
“Rosie”
(beep-beep!)
Speaking of preparing for vacation, I wrote a short checklist for preparing your server for unattended access while you’re away traveling: https://engineerworkshop.com/2019/06/19/preparing-your-server-for-vacation-the-unattended-server-access-checklist/
I love small and useful projects like this, nice find hackaday
Cool project, but I always cringe at the exposed electronics specially near water. You have a 3D printer: print a case for the electronics!
People complaining that he should have used a 555 in 3… 2… 1…