Creuzer – Page 185 – Random things Creuzer

Fish Feeder Final Assembly

At last, it comes toghether!!!!
Here you can see the lower stand-offs. They are simply bolts and nuts. I have the bolt tightened down and then have a second nut floating part way up the bolt to the height I need to get the servo to sit where it should. You can see in the photograph the double nuts on each lower bolt.

As all my good friend know, I like to over engineer things. I truly only needed the lower bolts, as the servo wanted to tip inwards. This tipping would have held the clutch halves together well enough. Not willing to leave well enough alone, plus, I made a special trip to Walmart on Easter Sunday, I added in the top bolts, plus a bracket to hold the battery case back on (I had cut tab and the thing-that-the-tab-goes-into off the battery case cover).

Here the servo is mounted into the housing. It doesn’t look to bad, now does it? A little bit of tweaking the tightness of the bolts to get every thing squared up, and I should be done!

My New Crock Pot

I went out and got myself a new crock pot. I rather like this one. It has 3 settings, High, Low, and Warm. It is designed to be hauled around even! There are latches on each side of the lid to clip the lid in place. It even came with it’s own spoon that clips into the lid!

A really neat feature is that the lid has little tabs so you can set the lid on one of the handles and it won’t go all sliding all over the place. I think this is a winner, I plan on using it a lot for the cooking club I am in.

Fish Feeder Clutch Modifications

The fish feeder has a really neat clutch mechanism that allows you to modifiy the drum in 5 minute increments. This will also work well as a servo-saver, just incase somethig bad happens – I don’t want to strip out my servo or the gearing.
Here you can see half the clutch mechanism and a standard servo bracket.

A little too much time with a side-cutters and a dremel left me with a hole too big, and a servo-mount too small. They don’t seat well to each other. The servo-mount is only slightly larger then the hole, and there are no flat surfaces to match up. It just wobbles around in the hole like a bobblehead doll.

As Terry Hansford always used to say, “I’ve cut it 3 times and it’s STILL too short!” I chopped up another servo bracket a little less aggresivly this time. It is still slightly small, but with a little bit of Epoxy, it should work.

The finished product. The epoxy tube says 24 hours before it is done curing, so in 8 hours, I am going to be playing with it *grin*. I think this will work, I now have a clutch that can be mounted to a servo.

Fish Feeder Housing Modifications.

Well… After 15 months of saving up my pennies and dimes, I could finally afford to buy the $12 fish feeder and the $12 servo to make the first part of my Internet Aquarium that will be ran off my Rabbitcore 3700.

I notched out the back for the Servo. I needed to cut out that tab so there was room for the mounting bracket for my Futaba S3003 servo. Lucky for me, there are 2 little marks that lined up exactly where I needed to cut.

Here you can see the cut-out for my servo.

This is how the servo will set into the housing. I still need to figure out the stand-offs. I have 2 options, shim it up with plastic or wood, or create nut and bolt stand-offs. The servo isn’t going to face much resistance, so I think that the bolts would be the best bet.

Here is what the feeder and servo looks like brom the back. The servo is just sitting in the houseing, but that is really close to where it will be located.

Daily-Double II Automatic Fish Feeder

Here is the automatic fish feeder that I like. They are fairly in-expensive if you buy them at Wal-Mart, usually between $10 and $12. Don’t get them at a petstore as they are usually $25 to $30! All they are is a Quartz Clock movement that rotates a feeder drum. The will feed the fish 2 times a day, 12 hours apart.
Here is an exploded view of the feeder. You can see the clock movement in this photo. You can also see the blue clutch mechanism that allows you to set the “time” that you want the fish to be feed.
A close up of the clutch. You can adjust the time of the drum to within 5 minutes.

My plans are to tear this thing apart and replace the clock movement with a RC hobby servo. By using a servo and a controller, I will be able to feed the fish when I want. My personal belief is that fish would be happier if feed less more frequently. I am a big critter, and I like to eat more often then 12 hours apart. How do you think the little critters take to it?