Feeding Mobi

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project was the humble Comet Fish and the heart of such a beautiful animal. A fish is simple in its demands but is one of the most beloved pets in the United States living in 10% of every person's home. Source Our little friend Modi desires only one thing, food.

What it does

My solution for the needs of our fishy friend is to keep track of the amount that Mobi needs to eat and feed him an appropriate amount of food based on the amount of time that has passed from his previous meal. I decided the best method for keeping track of this was a visual LCD display to show how hungry Milo is at a certain point increasing based on the amount of time that has passed. Once the display notifies the owner about the hunger status of Mobi the user can then press the button to initiate the feeding process.

How we built it

At the start, I created the display to visualize Mobi's hunger. After the display, I then programmed and installed a button to initiate the feeding mechanism and reset the hunger value on the display. From there the feeding mechanism was created using a servo rotating a tumbler feeding fish food into the tank. For the final step, I polished the rotation to increase based on the hunger value displayed on the LCD screen to prevent intentional overfeeding.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge of this project was attempting to deliver on the ideas formulated in the beginning of the event. Initially, the plan was to track the location of Mobi and calculate the calories burned to feed the perfect amount of food every time. However, that was deemed impossible by myself as there was no way to record light or temperature across the tank accurately to determine the location of Mobi without a way to focus the light from an LED or a concentrated light source such as a laser diode.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The greatest accomplishment of this project for me has to be the followthrough on the initial idea and the pivot that I had to do enable to create a project that achieves the initial goal of the project through other means than the one initially thought of.