Bird Feeder Robot

During the holiday or winter season the food leakages is a serious problem for birds. After the analysis of the state-of-art feeder robots, the expected goals were set and a bird feeder robot was built and tested. Solid works was used to design the 3D model of the robot. 3D printer and laser cutter were used to produce all the components. An Arduino governed all the sensors with a stepper motor. In order to give the certain amount of food, a special designed conveyor mechanism was applied. An humidity sensor was used to stop the robot when it rains, as well as a pressure sensor was adopt to measure the weight of given food. After five conceptual iteration, the excepted functions are basically realized. An quick start guide was given and the sustainability was analyzed. A group presentation showed the background and work distribution of all the group members

Feeding an animal is a delicate process that many owners of pets, in particular, bird owners, consider as one of the most important tasks in their daily activities. This process has a direct effect on their bird’s health since the amount of food, the way of feeding, how many times during the day this process should be done, all causes the bird to become healthy or sick. As a result, it is beneficial to them to have an automated device that does this procedure for them with highest accuracy and minimal error. This is exactly the goal of this project. In general, the goal of this project is: • Design a mechanism for Automatic feeding • Provide a safe structure for animal • Minimizing human interference with the procedure So, the purpose is to have a measured and controlled feeding procedure for birds with the bird owners as it’s User. It interferes with bird and floor in which the device would be put on. There are two kinds of needs that there have been several efforts to satisfy them. the first kind are the objective one, the ones hat is needed to be there. This includes the Automatic feeding, safety and weight of the device. There are also some needs that Users would like them to be there. this includes a reasonable price to the device , a high speed procedure and an appealing design.

There are 4 patents for products aim for the same purpose as the one this project has which is shown below. A comparison between these patents is done in figure 5. In this project the combination of the ideas of these patents are used. In one of them bird’s arrival gets detected and a calculated measure would be released, and the device would not start again unless the measured amount of food gets finished and the device senses that. In another patent a humidity sensor is used so that during rain, there would be no food distribution.

Basically, there are two categories of functionality. The first category is the external functions of the robot, directly useful to the users. Controlled feeding, simple usage of the robot, a reliable process with the minimal amount of noise and of course a reasonable price is amongst them. There are also another kind of functionality which are indirectly useful to user which includes a reprogrammed Arduino and a very easy way to fill the storage of robot. For this device, it is 1 enough to connect to a 12-v power source and connect the chip to a 5v power source and press the button so that the robot would be ready to do it’s function. Table 3 shows the overall requirements of the bird feeder robot.

The bird feeder robot can be divide into 2 main sub-system. One is the Mechanical system, the other is the circuitry & sensors sub-system. The circuit board is attached at the back of the Mechanical parts, fixed by screws. The humidity sensor was stuck on the side of food container and the pressure sensor was settled at the pressure sensor adapter. There is an pressure sensor trigger on the sensor. When the foods are given by the valve, the food will be accumulated at the top of the sensor trigger. Thus, the sensor collects the information of the amount of food. When the weight of the food over the setting value, stepper motor will stop giving more foods

The reason why the selection of manufacturing process of the main body is laser cut is because the shape of it is regular, and able to be constructed only by using exquisitely designed plates and fixed by males and females. Thus, the MDF are used because it is relatively cheaper and able to be cut by laser cutting machine. As for other components, the structure of them are complicated and not be able to manufactured by laser cut. It is worth noting that even though the slope is a flat plate, it is not orthogonal to other plates, therefore the 3D printing process would be better. As for the selection for production in large scale, everything is able to be produced by using injection molding. Thus, all the plastic material such as PP, PE, ABS and PVC could be used

Design for Assembly. The main body was constructed by plates, the figure shows the detail of the plates and the way they connected with each other. Bolts and nuts are used to increase the strength of the whole structure. Figure 14 demonstrate the assembly way of the slope and all the components.

The bird feeder is a machine used for feeding birds in public places automatically, the container and the plate for holding food, when there is no sufficient food inside, the bird feeder is suppose to provide extra food into the plate, meanwhile it should detect the weather condition in case of the food suffering from the rain. Here we considered the basic functions and decided to design it into sensor recognizing, motor control and basic circuit made. The work flow is as follow.

In early work, all the components were tested by order not only to confirm the quality but also to verify the method of application. Here both sensors and stepper motor have been already tested in the bread board with Dupont cables. After that, a base was welded on two separate circuit board, one is for motor control and another one is used for sensor driving.

Based on the requirement list one item did not get satisfied. Motor has noise when it rotates. So possible improvements are : • Reducing the stepper motor noise by increasing the micro stepping level and step frequency together 29 • Designing a door shape valve instead of a turbine shape valve and inserting the food all at once. • Selecting a high sensitivity pressure sensor and could obtain a more accurate loop control • Having a bigger tolerance in the male/female attachments when having a printed piece being inserted in a wooden one so that it is no needed to knock them with a hammer.

all the files including the codes, cad , ... regarding project can be found in this link :

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Y32OXSL93wLq2y6TvndzR-NOaNB0ezFK?usp=sharing Our group consists of 4 students:

• Mr. Yiming Yuan: Majored in mechanical engineering on bachelor degree. Personal common software: Matlab, Auto CAD, Solidworks 2015, Abaqus and so on. Worked on the mechanical design, CAD modeling and the Auto CAD files used for laser cutting. As well as its improvements. Favorite part of the project is the design of pressure sensor adapter and its trigger.

• Mr. Li Huanyu: Majored in mechatronic engineering and has years of working experience in energy industry, for this project who was responsible for control session design and testing, circuit welding, sensors and stepper motor applying, Arduino coding, implementing the circuit into main design and subsystem assembling.

• Mr. Nima Roshandel Majored in mechanical engineering on Bachelor degree was responsible for sensor implementation and its interaction with the main body, working closely with Mr.Li Huanyu and Also manufacturing the Main body using Laser cutting. Favorite part of the project was finding out how to adapt the pressure sensor to find its dead band.

• Mr. Josué García who was in charge of modifying the design and preparation the .dxf file of the component’s design for Laser cutting and manufacturing the first prototype, working closely with Mr. Yiming Yuan.