Simple remote fish feeder for aquarium with camera using raspberry pi

Purpose

Be able to feed your fish and watch it when on vacation for exampe using your phone. Usually, feeders, I guess, do not have cameras.
Very useful if you have a spare raspberry pi and some webcam and some reading tutorials skills.

Video description (on click)

Prerequisites

• Be willing to play with raspberry pi CMD and do some very simple soldering.
• Have (buy) a simple feeder Juwel Automatic Feeder (Juwel Easyfeed 15 Euro) or similar.
• Make app available outside the home network. One can use Dynamic DNS Providers. It is not as scary as it sounds, it is just another tutorial to read.

Features

• uses proper feeding device
• no need to do 3d printing
• it is cheap, especially, if you have spare old raspberry with some old webcam
• raspberry pi powers feeder
• it looks awesome
• you can see you fish
• uses basic authentication so noone else can feed your fish

Hardware

• Raspbery Pi (I used model B+)
• Juwel Automatic Feeder (Juwel Easyfeed) or with similar approach 3 Volt (2 x 1.5v batteries) which has a button for manual feeding.

Wiring

For this particular feeder feedPin.writeSync(0) should be manually start the process. I used 1k resistor between GPIO pin and switch but it might be unnecessary.

[+] is connected to PI 3.3V
[-] connected to PI ground

Software

1. install motion https://tutorials-raspberrypi.com/raspberry-pi-security-camera-livestream-setup/
   In the end I end up using mjpeg-streamer because it is not using as much CPU as motion on my hardware but if hardware is ok with motion go for it

2. install node v12.21.0

sudo wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sdesalas/node-pi-zero/master/install-node-v12.21.0.sh | bash
tar -xzf  node-v12.21.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz.1
cd   node-v12.21.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz.1
sudo cp -R * /usr/local/

3. Install app

In project folder

sudo git clone <this repo>
cd <this repo>
sudo npm install --unsafe-perm   onoff
sudo npm i

4. install supervisorctl
   Needed to start processes o n startup.

sudo apt-get install supervisor

Point supervisorctl config to the location of your app

sudo nano /etc/supervisor/supervisord.conf

[include]
files = /home/pi/remote-fish-feeder/supervisor_scripts/*.conf

After changing configs please run:

sudo supervisorctl reread & sudo supervisorctl update

Some useul supervisorctl commands:

sudo supervisorctl status
sudo supervisorctl stop all
sudo supervisorctl start all

Configuration

• check/provide your camera stream url in server.js, especially, if you are not using mjpeg-streamer
• change password in server.js so noone else can access your fish
• change the resolution if needed in video.conf
• do a nasty router config if you do not have a static IP. Check Dynamic DNS Providers tutorials.

For example I used https://www.duckdns.org/ and in Dynamic DNS Settings of my router.

Questions

If any questions/feedback please leave in video comments. I can also provide image of the raspberry pi OS with everything preinstalled if needed.