Feed My Fishy

Feed My Fishy is an IoT project that allows a person to remotely access their fish feeder,
and never worry about a hungry fishy again.


How it works

What do we have here?

Feed My Fishy is a servo-motor driven device that is triggered by a POST request that controls a function delivered by the Particle cloud through the Particle Photon.
DISCLAIMER : This video is a boomerang. The device only functions once at the click of a web-enabled button.

What does it use?

  • Cardboard pieces to make the prototype
  • The Particle Photon
  • Servo-Motor : In this case - The Futaba S3003
  • A fish-bowl + fish + some fish food + a power source (3.7 V Lithium Polymer Battery) - Not Shown In This Image

The Device

The device must be assembled in a way that the food is at a higher level and in a container that can drop a teaspoon of fish-food when the lever moves from 0°-90° degrees and back.

While at 0 degrees, the servo arm has a stick and a small piece of cardboard that is blocking the container's opening.

The servo-lever will only commence movement upon calling the function from the Particle cloud.

The brain behind the application - The Particle Photon

This project could even be successful with the use of an arduino connected to the computer or with a WiFi shield. However, the ease and simplicity of the Particle Photon is what made it a complete success.

The Photon is a WiFi developement kit that based on Cypress's WICED architecture, combines a powerful STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller and a Cypress Wi-Fi chip.

Wait. What controls it exactly?

A simple webpage.

A simple HTML document that uses the power of HTML5's form : action property can trigger the cloud to communicate to the photon that it has to run a certain function that has already been fed to it.

During this project the Photon had been rechristened 'Alexander' for the sanity of his master - The Blue Betta - 'Theodore'.

Voila!

So here we have it. Just a web-controlled fish feeder. No biggie.
DISCLAIMER : This video is a boomerang. The device only functions once at the click of a web-enabled button.