![]() ![]() Both ZAF and ZAF+ are adaptable to any laboratory environment and facilitate the implementation of aquatic colonies. The advanced version, ZAF+, allows for the precise control of food distribution as a function of fish density per tank, and has a user-friendly interface. ZAF is reliable, provides a standardized amount of food to every tank, is cost-efficient and easy to build. We have developed an open-source fully automatic daily feeding system, Zebrafish Automatic Feeder (ZAF). However, a challenging aspect of maintaining aquatic facilities is animal feeding, which is both time- and resource-consuming. Zebrafish are widely studied and relatively easy to culture using commercial systems. ![]() And for sure we need to find a better streaming setting that would allow us to watch the stream in better quality.In the past few decades, aquatic animals have become popular model organisms in biology, spurring a growing need for establishing aquatic facilities. It would be helpful to also control the direction of moving and do some shaking when food should fall down. So nothing or just a small portion fell into the water. Yaay again! But there is still space for some improvements for Christmas 2022.įood for the snail is a little bit bigger and sometimes it is stuck with fish food. And because you are reading it, they survived. This article would be most likely private if the fish or the snail would die. If it would not survive, it wouldn’t affect our feeder. So for safety reasons, we used another RapsberryPi just for streaming. ![]() The stream was in resolution 640x480px and 15 FPS and it still uses almost 95% of CPU time. So we weren’t able to optimize streaming enough. It is not a big surprise we kept everything to the last days. We have used ffmpeg tool and the prepared script can be found again in our public Gitlab repository.Įveryones know, the developers are lazy. So we decided to do a stream with a web camera on YouTube. But as the feeder is a piece of hardware, it is much harder to monitor. Visual feedback with non-stop stream to YouTubeĪccess with SSH, logging, and monitoring might check the software behavior. You can find the full script in our public Gitlab repository. So even during power strike, fish and snail would be fed after that. And the last feeding time was controlled programmatically. The python script itself was executed regularly every hour by Linux Cron. I was writing about it earlier.And for the worst case, we assigned a static IP address and set up port-forwarding to have access with SSH into the Raspberry. So besides some basic logging into the local file, I set up also monitoring with service Healthchecks.io. I wanted to be sure, it will be working flawlessly. In some situations, I could call myself a control freak. RaspberryOS comes with some nice integration into Python, so controlling GPIO (General-purpose Inputs Outputs) is super easy. We will use only 1 power supply and the feeder will contain also DC/DC step-down module to power Raspberry. And we had an old laptop power adapter that produce 19.5V. But RaspberryPi needs 5V and has 3.3V GPIO pins. The stepper motor driver needs input voltage in the range 8.2 - 45V and a logic voltage between 2.5V and 5.25V. So with colleagues, we decided to use the RaspberryPi which was unused in our office.Īfter we prepared RaspberryPi and we were able to control LED, we realized what will be the next challenge. I spent the whole weekend trying to find another solution to make it work, but unsuccessfully. But they removed also all images required to make the kit alive. I thought it means, that only new features are not coming. However, Google stopped this project meanwhile. I got an Android Things kit during Google Developer Days back in 2017 in Krakow, Poland. So we needed to do the next iteration and print the inner part again with bigger bowls. And the snail’s food was bigger than the bowl in the feeder. The first prototype actually worked! But in the tank, we have also snail, not just fish. First, we had to do a small modification to properly attach stepper motor. But the existing ones are either expensive or not compatible with our aquarium.įor more about side projects in our company, visit /blog So there was no spare tank to move the fish again. But during 2021 that tank became an Aquarium PC. □□ V češtině si lze článek přečíst na īefore Christmas 2020 we used our smaller tank and moved the fish to a colleague's flat. That might be too much for the fish without food. But our office building is closed every Christmas for almost 2 weeks. By that day all of us started to learn how to care about aquarium. All started 2 years ago, when a colleague got a Beta fish and brought it to the office.
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