Tiunkabouter
New Member
Hi everybody,
I just figured to post a thread about my feeder over here since you may want a feeder that can be controlled and something different than the Eheim feeder.
A little disclaimer:
-I run reef-pi on a freshwater tank
-i use the hardware from @robsworld78 bought through his site.
-as I use the hardware from Rob I’m not quite sure how to set up the feeder pin manually.
-feeder used is a JBL autofood
first I determined the minimal voltage the feeder needs to operate using a benchtop powersupply.
Turns out it even works when voltage drops below 3v, so the 3.3v used is not an issue.
I wired it up so the reef-pi hardware supply’s the power to the feeder and the manual feed button will be pulled to ground by the hardware and the feeder registers this as a push.
as for setting it up in reef-pi.
It’s just a timer that switches on and off directly after 1 second, the feeder then feeds the smallest dose.
And now comes the cool part with the feeder hooked up to the reef-pi.
The feeder can scale the amount of food in 8 steps, and the biggest amount possible is truly a lot.
If you want to set up larger amounts of food you just need to timers spaced 1 second apart to the amount you want.
So you set it up something like this:
11:00:00 on and back off for 1 second
11:00:02 on and back off for 1 second
11:00:04 on and back off for 1 second
that way you get food amount 3.
One other cool thing about this feeder is that you can pretty easy 3D print a screw with different pitch so you can also feed less than the “normal” minimal amount.
hope you guys find it useful or want to explore other types of feeders with this set up.
I just figured to post a thread about my feeder over here since you may want a feeder that can be controlled and something different than the Eheim feeder.
A little disclaimer:
-I run reef-pi on a freshwater tank
-i use the hardware from @robsworld78 bought through his site.
-as I use the hardware from Rob I’m not quite sure how to set up the feeder pin manually.
-feeder used is a JBL autofood
first I determined the minimal voltage the feeder needs to operate using a benchtop powersupply.
Turns out it even works when voltage drops below 3v, so the 3.3v used is not an issue.
I wired it up so the reef-pi hardware supply’s the power to the feeder and the manual feed button will be pulled to ground by the hardware and the feeder registers this as a push.
as for setting it up in reef-pi.
It’s just a timer that switches on and off directly after 1 second, the feeder then feeds the smallest dose.
And now comes the cool part with the feeder hooked up to the reef-pi.
The feeder can scale the amount of food in 8 steps, and the biggest amount possible is truly a lot.
If you want to set up larger amounts of food you just need to timers spaced 1 second apart to the amount you want.
So you set it up something like this:
11:00:00 on and back off for 1 second
11:00:02 on and back off for 1 second
11:00:04 on and back off for 1 second
that way you get food amount 3.
One other cool thing about this feeder is that you can pretty easy 3D print a screw with different pitch so you can also feed less than the “normal” minimal amount.
hope you guys find it useful or want to explore other types of feeders with this set up.
