Make Mini Fish Feeder at Home Controlled by Phone and Web Server

Hello people, In this instructables I will show you how I made this fish feeder device that can feed almost many household aquarium.

I have made the device so compact that you can carry it around wherever you go, made with 3d printed parts and the circuit is also doable for any newbie also.

To use this device all you have to do is add some food in the container, connect the device to any USB power source.

Wait for the device to be connected to given mobile device, now you can access the fish feeder on your phone, there are lots of options that you can choose, if you want to schedule the time of feed you can do that too.

All you need is a browser on your phone and for the connection we will us the microcontroller ip address.

You can get the ip address on the connected devices settings on the hotspot configuration option.

There is also an option to schedule the feeding time if you keep on forgetting to use this feeder, you can increase the size of feed by adding a pile of the fish food.

So Don’t let your fish starve and simply build this fish feeder tool and forget the concept of frequent feeding.

I have used a glass here for the showing of this projects working, you can also install this on an actual aqurium and it still works the same.

I have documented all the build steps in a video and you can see that in the last steps of this instructables.

Materials required to build fish feeder

Wemos D1 Mini

Micro Servo

Jumper Cables

Power bank

3D Printer

PLA Filaments

Mobile Phone

Arduino IDE

Programming Cable

Super Glue

Aquarium/ glass of water for testing

I have designed this fish feeder mechanism body using Tinkercad, The design is not very complex and it took me some time to finalise this design.

After several trial and errors I was able to come up with decent design.

I wanted to make the frame as simple as possible because more components equals more power consumption and more weight and overall the frame needs to be big.

So keeping all these factors in mind I designed this design and if you want to use my design I will give STL in this step below.

After you open the stl you can export the file to cura slicer, there is no much settings you can simply proceed with the default settings.

Since we have a box with one side open you do not need to use any supports at the time of printing.

There are 4 parts In total and all the parts follow the same setting, no rafts or no supports and the choice of color is left to you.

Show your creativity in choosing the colors and also mix the colors, anyways we get a beautiful color if we are using mix colors.

It took me around 2 hours to get all the printed parts ready, post process is not necessary but if you see any print webs you can remove that.

After this is complete you can simply head over to build the circuit.

The circuit is very easy and anybody can build it, also there is a detailed explanation on building the circuit.

I will connect the servo directly to the wemos board, check good quality jumper cables so that there are no loose connections after casing the components inside the case.

The servo motor is the only component here and the signal pin of the servo is connect to the d4 pin on the wemos board.

The gnd and vcc pins are conencted to the G and 5v pins of the wemos board.

If you bought and unsoldered pin wemos board then you can simply solder the wires directly this will even make the circuit more easier.

After the connections are complete, connect wemos board to computer using the programming cable and open arduino IDE.

Use the below code and all you have to do is change the credentials of wifi name and pw according to yours.

Select proper board type followed by checking on the port number now you can upload the code, if needed you may have to press the reset button at the time of uploading.

In my case the code got uploaded to the board without any problems, if you face any it mostly will be on the missing libraries, just download and install them

Turn on the mobile hotspot and connect to the ID as per the credentials given in the program.

Allow few seconds and then you can see the board connected to your mobile. just open browser and enter ip and you will see a panel, just change the numbers and see if the servo is working.

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Now we can install all the electronics inside this 3d printed case. I have allowed an extra space so that most of the wire types if used on the connections can be inserted to the case with ease.

I will start by inserting the wemos board inside the case first, now insert the wires that are out inside this and finally insert the servo.

I have given a dedicated slot to place the servo, if the servo size varies you can adjust the fit on the sides and glue the servo to this slot.

After all this is complete, connect the outer lid, Just add a tiny drop of super glue across the edges and you are good to go.

Now insert the lid for the servo shaft, there are 2 parts here one is the base and the other is the rotating part with holes.

Start by gluing the base to the servo body first followed by connecting the rotating part to the shaft of the servo directly.

If your servo shaft is not as the size of this part just add few drops of glue or a screw this will prevent the problems that may occur if the part is not connected to shaft properly.

On the other way you can add a small tube at the top of this if you want to feed the large fishes since they need more food.

Fix the fish feeder on the aquarium or the glass or the bowl wherever you want to use this device, now connect the board to usb power.

Simply turn on the hostpot on the mobile and allow a few seconds, you will see that the board is connected message.

If you have noted the IP address that can be pasted on your phone browser, Now you will be able to see a panel that shows the servo rotation angle, and schedule time and the servo activation button.

The slots on the feeder is for keeping the food that needs to be dispensed, place the required amount of food on these slots.

Now either schedule it or drop the food real time, to show you guys i dispensed the food in real time and you can see that here.

That winds up the build and working of this project, if you have any suggestions to add more features i will be happy to consider your ideas also.

Feel free to drop your questions on the comment box and watch this working video on the next step

Here is a video version of the tutorial that we just spoke about, also there is a video of setting this feeder on a small glass or the aquarium if you can say.

This was all about this project, if you still have any questions ask in the comments.

Looking forward to see the i made it section flood with your creations, Thank you.