Here is the front view of the feeder hooked up to my Rabbitcore Embedded Microcontroller. The Rabbitcore will eventually completely operate the fish feeder. It will also run the lights, and take the ambient temperature as well.
I am going to have the fish feeder to feed 3 times a day on a tight schedule, 30 minutes after lights on, 30 minutes before lights off, and half way in between. I am also going to “mix it up” a little bit and have it feed 2 times at a random interval. I am also going to have a manual “feed the fish” button. If this is used, it will count as the random feeding for that time period. I think this will make the fish much happier.
The fish feeder has the ability to adjust how much food is fed per feeding. I am going to have this turned all the way down, and increase the frequency to increase the the total amount they are fed. I don’t want to over feed the fish.
Well, here it is… a video of the automatic fish feeder in action. Sorry it is dark, blurry, grainy, and jerks around a bit, but it is the best I could do considering how excited I am. The Rabbitcore is currently running the servo-stop locater program that I wrote to find out how far each of my servos will run stop to stop, and what numerics I need to use for programming each individual servo. The two buttons I am pushing just moves the servo from one setting to the other. This program works well to check the functionality of the embedded microcontroller controlled automatic fish feeder.
GREAT!!!! your fish must be happy now.. can you please tell me how to establish a serial communication between a Microcontroller (rabbitCore rcm3100) and a servo using rs485 (I am newbie and struggling =_=)
I don’t think you can do that directly using that interface. I used the servo interface and ‘hobby board (or somesuch) ‘ library on my dev board to do the communication. I picked up a servo control board that you can communicate with via SPI or a few other protocols for use without the dev board, but never got around to getting it to work.