Automatic vacation Fish Feeder
Beau Schwabe
Posts: 6,560
Ok, so the problem with store bought automatic fish feeders is that none of them (at least that I have found) address turning off the filter pump as an orchestrated feeding event. The version I put together does.
The basic operation is as follows:
1) Turn the filter pumps off
2) dispense the food
3) wait for 30 minutes
4) turn the filter pumps back on
5) wait for 2 days and do it all over again
I used a solid state relay to control the AC. See Link below ...
http://cgi.ebay.com/New-Box-Solid-State-Relay-SSR-24-480V-AC-25A-/370411709020?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0
The basic operation is as follows:
1) Turn the filter pumps off
2) dispense the food
3) wait for 30 minutes
4) turn the filter pumps back on
5) wait for 2 days and do it all over again
I used a solid state relay to control the AC. See Link below ...
http://cgi.ebay.com/New-Box-Solid-State-Relay-SSR-24-480V-AC-25A-/370411709020?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0
Comments
Thanks,
-Phil
Absolutely... wait until this food runs out. Right now things are kind of hanging together and there will be a few tweaks along the way, but so far this has been in operation for about 3 weeks with feeding every other day once a day.
I have two filters on this tank ... 5 goldfish, 1 sucker, 2 minnows (<-my daughter wanted to see what they would grow up to be), and one tetra.
If your daughter is of an experimental bent, here's one to avoid:
When I was in about the third grade, we hatched guppies as a class project. Of course, there were scads of them, and everyone in class got to take some home. I kept mine in a Mason jar with a strand or two of seaweed.
Later that summer, my brothers and I went with my dad to a "father and son banquet" at church. The entertainment that evening was a local college professor who brought a dewar of liquid nitrogen and demonstrated all kinds of fascinating things with it. The pi
Thanks for the heads-up ... The idea is to eventually migrate the fish to an outside pond. We had one in Atlanta that had about 40 fish in it that we really enjoyed. The Sucker fish that we have will eventually outgrow the tank that we have and "he" (a.k.a. 'stealth') is supposed to get to about 18 inches long. Right now stealth is about 5 inches long.
I used to be into saltwater fish...I could have used this one. I never liked the automatic feeders on the market either. I always thought they wasted too much food.
I'm in the process of building an automatic feeder as an add-on to a finished project of mine. But it dispenses dog food. I'm still trying to figure out how exactly I want to meter it out, but I also have a lot of other features that I plan on adding and a lot of tinkering to do.
Nice job!
I'm trying to find a good way to make the auger for larger flake food.
Beau's method sure beats the typical automatic fish feeders commercially available.
If you had a problem with "packing", you could probably help it by placing a small tube in the bottom, and have a way to blow some pulses of air up through the column.
John R.
What I have thought up so far is: I want to use a screw/auger type device using a continuous rotation servo to meter out the food. It will empty into a cup with a standard servo atached to the side so it can rotate and dump the cup. I want the cup servo attached to an arm with a type of small load cell on it. That way I can weigh out the food and if I ever need to change the amount or I get another dog...I don't have to edit my code to change the amount. I can just use a user interface on my feeder, kinda a more advanced version of the interface on my Automatic Pet Fountain.
Likewise. I've been thinking about different ways to fabricate my own. The shaping can be kind of tricky. In concept, you could take a washer shaped piece of material, slit it, and fasten it to a shaft. In reality, there gets to be some "interesting" forces and distortions involved, but it can be done. I've played some with paper, and will be working on some plastic at some point (this is not a priority project).
For smaller sized items, you could probably just wind (and solder) wire around a rod.
For your dog food, you could also take Beau's concept one step further. Instead of a back and forth movement, make a disk with a series of holes, and have it rotate to move a continuous feed of "doses".
John R.
Thanks John for the ideas! I was thinking of making the flighting for my auger out of flat washers by cutting a split and bending them. Then welding them to a shaft. But, I wasn't too crazy about the time and work it would take.
You mentioned for smaller sized items that I could just wind and solder a wire around a rod. I'm going to use that idea, but take it further. I'm gonna try making a spiral of copper 12ga wire into about a 1" spiral. Then attach it to a central shaft. It will kinda be like an auger with all of the flighting material removed except for the edge.(I'll try to provide a pic of what I'm thinking) This concept will provide an auger to move the food without any jamming since it can simply pass over the top of the wire if it starts to jam.
Phil, they need to be frozen slowly and then typically 3 out of 5 can be revived. There are now thousands of people who have their bodies cryogenically frozen in the hope of being revived in the future. Actually, you don't need to deep freeze the subject to -109 deg. F, or you'd need to put in some kind of anti-freeze to minimize cellular rupture.
I have always wondered if there's a project to cool down the aquarium water when it's too hot.
Humanoido
A couple of options for cooling:
- Simply turn a fan on, blowing accross the top surface of the water, increased evaporation will help with cooling (along with blowing away heated air from the lamps).
- Turn on a solenoid to add cool water, or direct a flow of cool water through a heat exchanger (coil of tubing).
John R.The hardest part would be integrating a metal heat exchanger into the water without corrosion or leaching metal into the water. But this could be overcome with a closed cooling loop.
Another idea would be to mount the heat exchanging side directly to the tank's glass where a part of the glass acts as the "heatsink" thus isolating metal from the water, but mechanical stress from thermal expansion could be an issue.
Last idea I've had is to powder coat the heatsink so it can't have contact with water. The "working" side would be mounted in a filtration system to ease implemenation due to only needing to cut plastic to mount.
TEC's are fairly efficient & can serve dual purposes of cooling & heating. Also PWM modulation could enable fine adjustments as well. Really, the hardest part would be mechanical implementation, the electronics would be piece of cake with very easy programming & supportive analog control. The biggest cost would be a power supply capable of handling the load. It would have to be Switch Mode to keep efficiency decent.
It's basically a straight connection... no resistors or much of anything. I used an old piece of 4-conductor telephone wire and doubled up the wires but really not necessary.
The Solid state relay accepts anywhere from 3V to 32V DC to turn it "ON".
The output on this particular SSR can drive up to 25 Amps. Way over kill for the SSR to be driving a fish tank pump, but I have I have several of these SSR's. I use them for Halloween lighting and Christmas lighting and have driven about 1000 Watts through them and they are 'maybe warm' but it's almost hard to tell. I haven't pushed one of them to their 25 Amp rating thou I'm sure it could take it just fine.
The output side of the SSR is connected just like you would connect a switch. I lobotomized an extension cord I had, and made a splice for the SSR.
I make my own fish food (gelatin based cubes) so on the one hand, I don't have portion issues, on the other, I would need to keep the jello cool.
An interesting thread.
One question though - do you also link up a sound playback system to talk to your fish when you're gone. I notice that everyone with pet fish does this and the fish'd probably get lonely when you are not there
If the product tends to hang in the delivery tube, you may be able to attach a vibrator off an old cell phone. They are usually minute 3.2 volt motors.
Your feed system is ingenious. I have been thinking about it
We used a similar system to fill 125gm packets of a specialised powder detergent about 20 years ago. The spec was that 96% (2 Std Dev) of the bags had to weigh more than 118gms (5% below marked weight). We could achieve this by setting the average fill rate to 131gm or 10% overfill. What makes this even more impressive is that the powder weight to volume ratio varied by as much as 5% and tended to compact (get heavier) when the hopper was full.
On small volumes like you are dispensing, you won't find a system much more accurate unless you weigh, which in my opinion is TOTALLY impractical.
You wont get the +- 5% volume accuracy we did (after discounting volume changes) but I think your system is more accurate than a simple screw feeder simply because screw feeder tend to "leak" the flakes when they stop and this leakage would not be consistent, dose to dose.
Well done, I am impressed...
I finally found a suitable auger for my dog food dispenser. In a desperate last attempt in finding something that wasn't expensive and didn't have to be custom made, I did a search for small plastic augers and what came up was perfect! It was something I had seen before and never thought of it...the plastic auger out of a chocolate fondue fountain. I can buy one for a whole $8, sad it took this long to come up with something. Now I have found the key part that I needed, now I just need to find some of that elusive time that I need to start fabing. I have found that a new son(first) takes a lot of that time!!