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ZAF stands for 'Zebrafish Automatic Feeding', it is an easy to build robot that can automate fish feeding at your fish facility -- with minimal supervision. ZAF is an open access project with both hardware designs and software designs openly provided. We give all instructions for building ZAF leveraging only commercially available parts.
Merlin: before mentioning problems, please list the advantages of ZAF and why it is cool here.
ZAF comes in two version: first, there is ZAF-easy which is very easy to build, but has some limitations (see below), ZAF-next addresses most shortcoming of ZAF-easy, has a more advanced design, but is also harder to build. We give instructions for both versions because we believe that different fish facilities sans users have different scales and needs.
The main limitation of ZAF-easy is that it lacks precise control of the amount of food. ZAF-easy distributes the same homogenised mix of food and water to al tanks. If you have in one tank 12 fish and in another 6, with ZAF they will receive the same amount of food. Also, ZAF-easy is more susceptible to tube clogging than ZAF-next. In practice we have used ZAF successfully in our facility and found it to be very beneficial. In truth, manual feeding is also not very reliable in terms of food quantity delivered and so as long as there is enough food provided we have not seen any issues. However, to avoid wasting food, clogging, and the risk of overfeeding, we designed ZAF-next, that builds upon the existing modules of ZAF 1.0 but adds better flow control and food quantity regulation. With ZAF-next you can control the food quantity delivered to each tank individually!
So, after ZAF is you feel adventurous, we strongly recommend you to build ZAF-next, a slightly more complex robot, but a very powerful one.
You will find the details protocol to build your own ZAF and ZAF-Next. Both share a common design principles: ZAF-Next is designed as an extension to ZAF-easy. Thus, even though we present two independents manuals for both, they share some common modules such as the food mixing and the pumps modules.
The manuals for ZAF-easy and ZAF-next are divided in three main part
- The hardware
- The electronics
- ZAF control software
