3D Printer Programmable Fish Feeder

joblow

http://www.instructables.com/id/Program ... Y6IF0XUUV6

Maltair

Printing now! Thanks

boss

Very cool JowBlow. Thank you.

joblow

I'll be interested to see how they turn out, I don't have a 3D printer to try it myself. :dontknow:

I've seen a few 3D printer plans but thought this one was the best of them all.

rininger85

Maltair please let us know how it works. I might be interested in having someone print me a few if they work well.

rininger85

I think you can get away without the resistor... from what it sounds like they are just using the resistor the stop battery draining. From one of my arduino experiments that I tried building fish feeders with they just disconnected the servo from the pin at the end of the code, then have it reconnect the next time trigger that comes up... otherwise the servo draws more power... so I think looking at this you can get rid of the resistor and the extra solder board by just having the code disconnect from the pin which I have a sample code of on my computer at home if you need it I can find it.

rininger85

After a week of tinkering with prints that don't turn out I have finally got one to work the whole print! One more layer and my first feeder will be complete! Then I just have to assemble the arduino portion of it.

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joblow

Looking great, well done :thumbright:

rininger85

I'm finally getting around to putting this thing together and there are a couple of design flaws. I go to put my Arduino nano in the box and quickly realized that it was designed for a nano that does not have the pins soldered in already because the direction they put the hole for the power cord to run through you have to have the pins point towards the wall so you can't connect to them... they won't fit with the pins soldered in that direction to begin with... so I start cutting out the hole to put the board in backwards and then I found that the hole is too low, or the board is too wide so the cord hole needs to be moved up too.. so I cut that out higher up too.

I will give this version a try and if it works halfway decent I will draw up a better version that doesn't have these design flaws in it.

rininger85

I used a 20 ounce soda bottle as my feed hopper and only filled the bottle half full went out to mount the feeder on my tank and it immediately broke the back part of the piece that holds the feeder in place. I had decided previously that was a weak part of the design as well, now I definitely need to draw something else up.

On the bright side, the feeder seems to work well but it does not dispense much food at a time... It would be ok for ornamental fish tanks but you have to run the program quite a few times to dispense any food. I have the program set to run 6 times every hour and it is still a child's handful at best. I will try to make a deeper feed well when I redraw it to make it more useful for feeding fish for maximum growth.

LowCarbTNPer

I always like web4deb's design, would be cool if we can find a standard motor to use and design a printable feeder similar to that. Maybe to save plastic and time instead of printing a hopper can fit a 3" pipe?

rininger85

LowCarbTNPer wrote:

I always like web4deb's design, would be cool if we can find a standard motor to use and design a printable feeder similar to that. Maybe to save plastic and time instead of printing a hopper can fit a 3" pipe?

You mean like this??? This was my last attempt at a feeder before trying the 3D printed feeder. I was trying to copy web4deb's design but I do not have the metal working skills he has to be able to weld it together etc. So I tried using what I know... PVC... it didn't work very well.

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I used a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor to drive a large auger bit. It worked well for a day or two but seemed like it quit working pretty quickly. After a couple days I had mold growing on the exposed food so I knew it had quit working.

Now this 3D printed version isn't working well either. I built it just as they showed and it works when I first reset it I can make it work, but it has been running for a while now and I have no noticeable amount of food missing from the container.

Admittedly, my problem for both of these feeders might be my arduino skills. The 3D printed feeder I copied the code that was posted on the link but he has added a lot of extra garbage for on demand feeding using a button and stuff like that which he doesn't show in the instructable so I tried pulling that extra stuff out of the code to simplify it... I might have boogered it up. Or it might not work with pellet food, it is really hard to see what type of food he is using in the instructable but it doesn't look like pellets.

LowCarbTNPer

Yeah, somewhat but still having a long feeding area where the pellets go into the auger versus a small PVC pipe. Admittedly I'm no engineer but I always felt that would really help with clogs/feeding issues. Then going up to a similar square hopper or to save filament going up to a 3" PVC instead like yours.

If we use a 3D printed auger too it will be much lighter and easier to turn than a metal one too. I started playing with one last night which I attached.

LowCarbTNPer

Something like this. I would have made the feeder body rectangular at the bottom and morph round to turn into a circle to match the pipe socket but couldn't figure out how to do it tbh. (I'm a newb at this whole CAD thing.)

rininger85

I gotcha... just my feed inlet is too small so it's getting stuck and backed up... makes a lot of sense. To be honest I hadn't even considered 3D printing the hopper/feed chamber to adapt to PVC.

I need to order my glass bed so I can take the warping issue out of my printer to be able to print reliably... haven't printed anything lately because it is so time consuming getting a print started only to walk away and have the print fail because of the bed not being flat.

I'm not sure what you mean about making it rectangular at the bottom, but at least in SolidWorks what you are looking for is a loft. In order to get it to work correctly in SolidWorks you have to draw the two profiles that you want to merge so draw your rectangle sketch then go up however far and draw your circle sketch then draw a third sketch that acts as a guide curve and then hit loft and tell it to connect the two profiles together following the guide curve. The guide curve is usually pretty important because without it the profile tends to warp and do funny things... defining the guide curve makes it go straight along the guide curve.

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