I had planned to connect my eheim feeder to my reef-pi controller, but ran into issues with the new generation of feeder. I emailed back and forth with the robo-tank guy who has a guide for doing this with the older version, but AFAICT it doesn't work with this version. I also am not very skilled in electronics (I know just enough to be dangerous), so I might have been missing something.
Because I am not skilled at it, I accidentally completely fried my feeder by accidentally sending 24V through it (oops). It made quite a bit of the magic electric smoke, and then didn't work anymore.
I almost went ahead and just bought an eheim clone off Amazon, but I realized I probably had all the parts through a combination of the burnt out eheim + a bunch of ESP32 wifi/bluetooth microcontrollers to DIY this.
A couple hours of tinkering later and I have a wifi feeder that I can now control from my reef-pi controller (source on github). Total cost in materials ~$6 + the eheim's body and motor.
From the side, put together, it looks clean (though I need to re-print that mount I made in black so it doesn't look janky).
The main downside is I didn't install any buttons, so I currently can only trigger a feed from a computer. I also need to get a longer usb power cord for it.
For controls I'm manually feeding it at the moment (
This is certainly not a cost effective hack (it'd be far cheaper to buy the $20 wifi feeders on amazon), but it was nice not to toss this in the trash, a fun learning project, and now I can do whatever with it.
Because I am not skilled at it, I accidentally completely fried my feeder by accidentally sending 24V through it (oops). It made quite a bit of the magic electric smoke, and then didn't work anymore.
I almost went ahead and just bought an eheim clone off Amazon, but I realized I probably had all the parts through a combination of the burnt out eheim + a bunch of ESP32 wifi/bluetooth microcontrollers to DIY this.
A couple hours of tinkering later and I have a wifi feeder that I can now control from my reef-pi controller (source on github). Total cost in materials ~$6 + the eheim's body and motor.
From the side, put together, it looks clean (though I need to re-print that mount I made in black so it doesn't look janky).
The main downside is I didn't install any buttons, so I currently can only trigger a feed from a computer. I also need to get a longer usb power cord for it.
For controls I'm manually feeding it at the moment (
$ mosquitto_pub -h <ip> -p 1883 -t execute/triggerFeed -m '{"rotations": 4}'), but this weekend I'll make it auto run. My first option will have the reef-pi trigger it on a schedule (cron job), but I have most of the smarts in place to have the feeder run the schedule on its own, so I'm not sure which route I'll go. Having the controller do it seems safer, but not really sure.This is certainly not a cost effective hack (it'd be far cheaper to buy the $20 wifi feeders on amazon), but it was nice not to toss this in the trash, a fun learning project, and now I can do whatever with it.