My project was an automatic fish feeder. I often forget to feed the fish, so I built a machine to fix this! By using the If This Then That (IFTTT) app on my phone, I am able to trigger the fish feeder from wherever I am. I do this by texting a set phone number. The app can read when I have sent a text to that number and it calls a function saved on my photon. This function will feed the fish! Once the fish have been fed, I have a line of 3 LEDs that will blink red until more fish food is loaded into the container. To indicate that food has been loaded into the container, a button is pressed and held until the LED's turn off permanently. To actually dump the food, I have a 24V DC motor connected to a relay. This allows me to use the particle photon to communicate with the 24V motor without damaging my circuit board. I send out a 5V signal for around 1.7s to the relay, which triggers the 24V motor to make one full rotation. This dumps food out of the container and into the tank!

A Slideshow describing the components of my project

My project has three main parts, The particle photon breadboard, the relay breadboard, and the motor. The slideshow has close up images of all of these parts

Video of my project in action!

This video shows off what my super cool fish feeder can do.

Another video showing off the project (with a gorgeous guest feature on it)

This video is a lot longer, but I go a tiny bit more in depth with how everything works.

Below is the schematics for my project

I created this drawing using microsoft visio. It is a drawing app that includes a library of "engineering" shapes that make it easy to draw out schematics!