Fish Feeder and Watering System

Intro

This project is comprised of a home made fish feeder and a water pump. We were about to go on holidays for a couple of weeks and did not want to ask friends or relatives to come over and feed the fish everyday. I decided to use my Tessel but wanted to make the project as cheep as possible.

Mechanics

The fish feeder is made with things I had around the house.

A plastic bottle is suspended between two poles and rotated by a servo. A small whole is cut into the bottom so the food falls out when the whole is at it's lowest point. A larger whole is cut in the top to fill the bottle with food.

I used a peristaltic pump pump attached to a piece of wood for the watering system.

The pump cost around $4 on eBay and is attached to the relay module on the Tessel. The pump pulls water from a bottle.

And drips onto the plant.

Interface

The app is available at (yourTessel'sname).local:8080 for anyone connected to the WiFi network.

The user is able to turn on the water pump or feed the fish with a click of the buttons at the top or several timers can be set below.

The interface is pretty roar but it does the job for now.

Code

https://github.com/finalwombat/tessel_plantAndFishFeeder

The app is written in express and uses the module node-schedule. I chose node-schedule because it is a small library and offers flexible scheduling. Jobs can be scheduled on specific dates and times and recurrence rules can be anything from everyday to only the third Sunday of every month. This turned out to a bit of over kill for what I needed as I only ended up scheduling jobs everyday.