Aquaponics - Fish feeder

I like to invent stuff.

I also like my fish to be fed.

I'm going to try to combine my two likes into one uber-like.

There are probably a zillion ways to do this but I can only think of a few.

A tiny electric motor with a reduction gearbox would do the trick. If the gearbox had a reduction ratio such that it turned a drill bit extremely slowly, you could drill a hole through a plastic bottle, fill it with fish feed, and then poke the device through so that as it turned (very, very slowly) the drill would push feed out at a constant rate. Or you could hook it up to a small solar panel and make it work only when the sun was out. You could also connect it to a timer to create preset feeding times so as to be able to control exactly how much food to offer.

In order to gear my chip cooling fan motor down from around 3200 rpm, I had to jump through some hoops. To get it to turn as seen in the video, I started my reduction gearing by having the near center surface of a rotating computer fan rub against the outside edge of a fan from an old photo copier. This fan is connected to a gearbox reducing rpm even further. The photo copier fan and gearbox were connected via the thin shaft by rubber band to a thicker shaft made of PVC. The PVC was connected to the front of a fishing reel. The fishing reel acts as yet another reduction gearbox. The handle of the fishing reel was connected to a soft rubber hose to act as a uni-joint, allowing me to not have to attempt to be fussy with lining up the drill bit that went through a soft drink bottle. As this all rotated my chickens ate the delivered bird seed under the decking.



This is still turning way too fast to be useful unless connected to a timer. It's also way too zany to be put into actual use.