fish feeder

10 Articles

Arduino-Based Dispenser Delivers Liquids, Powders

May 7, 2015 by 8 Comments

If you like to cook or bake, you probably don’t measure everything out in little bowls and ramekins before you start. Well,unless you also happen to like doing dishes. Even so, there are a lot of measuring spoons and -cups that end up getting dirty in the process. But what if you had a measuring machine to dole out spices and low-viscosity liquids in specific quantities for you?

[enddev]’s creation is based around an Arduino Mega, and the interface is three buttons and an LCD. The user selects between liquid and powder, followed by the desired measurement. If liquid is chosen, the peristaltic pump is engaged to deliver the specified amount through silicone tubing. The current powder setup uses a kitchen scale, which the designers found to be inaccurate for small amounts. They believe that a volume auger and stepper motor would be ideal.

The team mentions that the powder delivery system is better suited for flakier substances since it’s basically agitated out of the container. This makes us think this would be great for feeding fish. If you take this admirably-written Instructable and use it to feed your fish or something, let us know. Their code is on the gits.

[via Embedded Lab]

Training Fish To Feed Themselves

March 26, 2015 by 41 Comments

We’ve featured quite a few aquarium and fish feeder hacks on our blog. [RoboPandaPDX] thought of taking it up a notch and make an interactive fish feeder. He built a Fish feeder that train’s them to feed themselves.

A copper bar hangs from the middle of a metal cylinder – much like a bell. The end of the bar has a fish lure. When a fish pushes the lure, the copper bar touches the metal cylinder and  closes the circuit. This signal goes to an Arduino. To catch the attention of the fishes and to “teach” them, an RGB LED is used. The fish need to figure out that the feeder will dispense food only when the LED is ON and the Lure is pushed. If the fish figure that out, and push the lure when the LED is on, a servo is activated which pushes the feeder to deliver 1 unit of fish food. While at it, he added a couple of bells and whistles. A buzzer to indicate when the Lure switch is closed and a 2 line LCD shows how many times the switch has been activated and how long the program has been running.

A Sparkfun  open logger stores the hit count and the minutes and seconds of the hit for data analysis later on. The good news is that it seems to be working. The current code activates the feeder for 30 to 60 minutes every day, which is indicated by the LED. At the end of 9 days,  [RoboPandaPDX] found that the goldfish would hit the Lure when the LED turned on, and then turn around to face where the feeder would dispense food in to the tank. His next plan is to put up some obstacles along the path to see if the fish learn some new tricks. His schematic looks a little iffy (the Lure switch is connected to the RST pin of the Arduino), and it seems he cannot remember why he ever did that. He’s happy that it works though, but we’re sure that’s not the right way to wire it up.

[RoboPandaPDX] is looking for suggestions on improving his interactive feeder, so if you have any, do add them in the comments below.

If you need some more fish feeder ideas, check out this and this that we blogged about earlier.

An MSP430-based Automatic Fish Feeder

December 8, 2014 by 9 Comments

[Dmitri] wanted to buy an automatic feeding setup for his aquarium, but he found that most off-the-shelf feeders are really inaccurate with portion control. [Dmitri]’s fish is sensitive to overfeeding, so an off-the-shelf feeder wouldn’t get the job done. Since [Dmitri] knows a thing or two about electronics, he set out to build his own microcontroller-based automatic feeding machine.

[Dmitri]’s machine is based around a MSP430 that starts feeding at scheduled times and controls how much food is dispensed. The MSP lives on a custom PCB that [Dmitri] designed, which includes a stepper motor driver and input for an endstop sensor. The board is wired to a stepper motor that advances a small wooden board with a series of holes in it. Each hole is filled with a single serving of food. The board slides along a piece of U-channel, and food drops out of each hole into the aquarium when the hole reaches the end of the channel.

The whole build is very well documented, and [Dmitri] explains each block of his schematic in detail. His firmware is also open-source, so you can build your own fish feeder based off of his design. Check out the video after the break to see the feeder in action.

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