AutoFeeder: Your thoughts?

[SycoSquirl]

as a person who travels a lot I have everything on timers and set up for ease of use, but its always been a concern of mine about getting friends to feed him. My boy got his eye infected and so i've been having to board him at the vet for a whole month since none of my friends could give him medication but I would be willing to pay a good 100-200$ for a feeder system that could change up the types of bugs along with daily feedings. My chameleon hates roaches and beatles so he only really likes to eat crickets and stick bugs and superworms and he will occasionally like hornworms and silkworms but if there was a way to house them all in a giant container and get them dusted and sent out into the cage i would drop mad bank for that so I dont need to rely on people who have no idea what to do anything related to caring for a chameleon even with detailed instructions

 

[reyesjoshuacruz]

motors

You'll want to use a servo, or stepper motor to drive the motion. Steppers will give you more torque and incremental movement, but will require more tech to govern.

Servos are easier to work with.


Are you planning a commercial design? or open source?

 

[Tyzoone]

Thanks reyesjoshuacruz and SycoSquirl for your great feedback and thoughts. I'm more motivated than ever to push this thing forward.

"so I dont need to rely on people who have no idea what to do"

scycoSquirl this was huge for me as well because my wife is disgusted by the feeders and won't help while I'm away working long hours every so often and my son is a bit too young to grasp the process... The plan is to allow various feeders within the separate compartments so the cham can have their normal variety. I still have to run tests on dusting techniques however... Maybe they get dusted prior to inserting them into their individual compartments? This mitigates me making this super bulky monstrosity of a thing that takes over our cages and becomes an eye sore.

reyesjoshuacruz I've been looking into steppers but they seem like overkill for this project and they definitely do require more technical know how. I am more of a designer/business oriented person myself so this is slightly going outside my realm. I've got a few things off amazon ordered for assembling in the next few days to run some tests. I'm trying a timer that rotates a dial for 7 days and I'll have a circular plastic disc that has 14 compartments to distribute the feeders 2 times each day in that 7 day period.

I haven't looked in to Servos at all. Any resources you have on these would be a big help! And I'm only concerned at the moment with prototyping for the time being but I would like to get in to some manufacturing as I have 3d printing/molding and casting experience to go along with it. The trickiest part has been finding something that rotates slowly enough that isn't blowing my mind apart to figure out.

Baby steps to the prototype ha!