Rotifer Tower

[schiwo]

Can you elaborate on that?

I hope I can do

The inkjet printer/plotter contains all the things you need for a 1axis feeding system. The axis of normal inkjets will be to short 20-30 cm but for testing and tryout it will work.

I cannibalized an epson stylus color printer. It contains 2 stepper motors one for the cartridge holder and one for the paper feeder.
The cartridge holder is belt driven on a shaft and can pick up the bottle with the plankton.

 

[herring_fish]

One axis is all that you need really.

I added the second axis just because I thought that I could. I was just doing the research and found a good use for it but it is not necessary. What I want to add is a set of dividers to keep bubbles from splashing contaminating animals from one tower to the next. This may not be an issue.

I have also looked at salvaging from a printer but I didn't know enough to pick the right unit to pick the right parts from. While I have learned a bit, I just don't know much about electronics.

I ran across a lot of people on forums that use the Arduino mini-controller board. I felt that they could walk me through the electromechanical part of it. That was true and I thank them for the help but if you know more about it, you can do quite well going in the direction that you are pursuing.

 

[schiwo]

Using an arduino should not be the problem. Here is a complete motor shield for arduino. http://www.ladyada.net/make/mshield/

You don't need the electronic from the printer, you only need the mechanical parts. The stepper motor has a 4 pin cable that can be connected directly to the motorshield

 

[herring_fish]

Derek4real,

Thanks for the article. The Geosapper is a great little unit. It seems to have been designed with a great deal of thought.

I don't think that I am going in the same direction at all. My design won't fit under the display thank and my design is much more complicated. While the Geosapper is designed to be scalable, my design is an order of magnitude bigger and offers no surge.

I am trying to feed non-photosynthetic (NPS) coral as well as everything else in a mixed reef tank while keeping the monthly price down. An NPS tank can cost hundreds of dollars per month in food. I am also trying to feed clouds of live plankton without requiring large water changes like the most successful NPS growers. Many of them supply the tank with a large percentage of dead food so the nitrates and phosphates require extraordinary measures to keep water quality under control.

My single test tower serves up two gallons per day divided into 8 servings or more but I don't think that it is enough. That is why I want to make a bank of them and want to add the robot. When a 2 gallon batch of water is pumped into a tower, it drips back into the display tank through a ¼ inch tubes so it is slow.

The Geosapper is probably a better fit for more people because it is smaller, simpler and has no moving parts

 

[herring_fish]

The cartridge holder is belt driven on a shaft and can pick up the bottle with the plankton.

Why are you using a bottle? Will it be a drip feed unit?

 

[schiwo]

Why are you using a bottle? Will it be a drip feed unit?

I've several ideas:

1. Unsing persitaltic pumps, but here is the problem that you must wash the tubes after feeding, because the rest will dry and...

2. Using a bottle with two valves: open 1 refill feeding chamber? close1, open 2 feed close2. Airbubbles in the bottle to avoid agglutinating.

3. Motordriven feeding chamber connected to the bottle, like the 6 valve but only 1 chamber,

 

[dave willmore]

I've just discovered your thread and thank you for tackling such difficult issues. I'm trying to set up a similar automatic system to grow and feed plankton. Like you, I will not use impeller pumps or skimmers.

But I have a stupid question. Why not use a gravity system? Put the nutrient water on a top shelf and drip it or dose pump it down the phyto tanks on the next highest shelf, then drip or dose pump the phyto to the rotifer tank on a middle shelf, then drip the rotifers into your dump tray.

I am probably missing something obvious and will feel a little sheepish when you explain it.
A gravity system seems to make the most sense to me. I was hooked on the idea of solenoids but am changing my mind to go with a bunch of aqualifters or dosing pumps.

Hope I can help out when I'm more clear as to your goals.

 

[herring_fish]

Welcome

Welcome

This is simply a matter of scale. Your gravity system should work very well but I am trying to tackle the same problem at a higher volume. I had looked at a similar design but if I wanted lots of volume, I needed to take up lots of floor space and needed to buy vats. If I wanted to have an auto-clean bottom, it would be hard to get vats with an angle on them. They do sell angled bottom vats but the angle isn't that steep and they are very expensive.

I have been searching for ways to grow non-photosynthetic corals, predatory corals and other filter feeders. The few people that have had great success use very large amounts of zoo and phyto-plankton, injected into the tank on a continues basis. They end up with high nutrient load because most of their feed is dead food.

I am hoping that multiple 7 or 8 gallon containers will provide the amount of zooplankton that the corals need. The tall tubular shape that I picked allows for comparatively efficient use of valuable space. This also allows me to add a funnel shape at the bottom because the removal of solid waste at the bottom of the container is an issue that I had seen and read about.

Refrigerated storage of the phyto(dead)plankton and metering it out, is also an issue. I do not have the personality to manage a medium sized phyto farm as well.

The controller was the only way that I could get the level of detail and accuracy that I wanted. You can probably use one on your project as well, no matter what the size is. I am a designer by trade and I do strongly believe that simpler is better but I have gone off the deep end on this project.

I basically enticed myself to move up to a higher playing field of motors and controllers because it would be a fun challenge. I didn't know anything about it when I started but I think that I have gotten all of the code and components, motors, racks, lifts, slides etc. to work individually. I have gotten one tube to run "œhands free" for months.

The only thing that I am having problems with is final assembly. Fabrication was hard to get done because it is much easier to crank out the design or some code in several all night sessions but I find it personally hard to find the time to finish the hands on nuts and bolts. I have LOTS of other things that compete for assembly time.

I hope that you follow along, ask questions, offer suggestions and keep us posted on your planning and implementation of your project. You may come up with ways to simplify my project.

 

[dave willmore]

What a great answer. We have the same goals, converting waste into lots of live plankton and avoiding nutrient problems. I am tackling it from a different angle and throwing water volume and light at the problem instead of technology. My tank is in a greenhouse and there is a 4,000 gallon sump underneath to grow brine shrimp and later copepods.

I'm lifting the reef off the sand a couple inches and then "leaf blowing" detritus around to a settlement chamber. From there the poop is ground up and dropped into a sump full of brine shrimp which eat the poop and produce babies. I hope that the artemia will convert all the poop into 5 million or so BBS per day to feed planktivore fish and corals, including NPS. Similar to you, I'll pump high nutrient brine shrimp water into phyto reactors. Phyto drains into rotifer tanks, the brine shrimp sump or directly to the tank.

My angle is to use clear plastic bags in clear containers for phyto cultures instead of cylinders. I will use the bags to line trash cans afterward. I hope cleaning is held to a minimum because after a use or two the bag gets replaced. I am in the process of getting an arduino and relays to time the $15 Toms aqualifters for dosing. I may go the route of more expensive dosing pumps, but I think that careful timing of aqualifters may accomplish the same purpose for less money.

I don't have your mechanical ability so I am forced to simple solutions, which can be both good and bad. I'm aiming for full recycling, although I will not get there. I only discovered arduinos a couple weeks ago and am very excited about all their possibilities.

So I think we are kindred spirits, aiming to convert waste into live food instead of dumping a quart of puree into the tank each day. Although we are approaching the problem from slightly different angles I think we have a lot in common. Especially the time part, my 3 kids and working wife and 50 hour job tell me that automation is the only way to go.

 

[herring_fish]

Wow

I will have to read this several times to get it down. I thought that you were talking smaller but you are going big. You should have all the plankton that you want.

This should be great to see develop. Thanks for joining in.

 

[herring_fish]

By the way my system is basically a gravity fed system as well.

On another subject: As I wrote, in part, in an earlier post on 07/16/2011, I plan to use a junction where all the feed goes to. I could have several feed sources going to this junction. As the pumps pull food out of the bottles and drives it to the junction, it will be air tight and therefore SOULD not clog. (I hope, I hope, I hope)

Once the food goes past the junction, the replacement water will flush the junction with comparatively clean water from the display tank (about 2 gallons each time a tube is fed). One tube may need food A, the next uses food D and the next might need foods A and B and so on, once every 3 hours or less. It is better to feed less, more often so I may be able to go every hour. A continues drip system would be even better but I can't fit that into this sized system with different animals in so many different tubes.

All of the liquid food containers, feed pumps and the junction need to be inside the refrigerator.

This is a picture from a post buy uhuru 12/09/2010, 10:29 PM in the
Thread: Reef Central Online Community > Coral Forums > Non-Photosynthetic Corals > Continuous feeding NPS filter feeders

It shows how he and others are tackling the issue of the food spoilage. They may have more in their main refrigerators and move a few weeks worth to the mini fridge to be doled out on a hourly, daily and weekly basis, "hands fee".

As you can see, some of them have mixers, air bubblers and other equipment along with tubing and pumps.

They are directly feeding the mostly dead food. I would feed "œindirectly". My feed would go to the plankton and the plankton would go to the main tank. I hope that having a zooplankton farm in my garage will reduce the over all nutrient load and be more effective at growth corals that like to dine on living plankton.

Of course dreaming is the easy parts. They have success in hand already.

 

[dave willmore]

OK, a couple of more thoughts. I am also trying for larger scale volume and will try to base my system around the clear 33 gallon leaf bags. I agree with the difficulty and cost of cylindrical-conical culture vessels. They are expensive and hard to accomodate in a residence.

I have a trite little saying about aquaculture. Growing organisms is easy if you can grow zooplankton. Growing zooplankton is easy if you can grow phytoplankton. But growing phytoplankton is hard. You need lots and keeping out contaminants is tricky. But if you recycle your high nutrient fish poop, there is little need to add new nutrients (food) to your tank.

You just need lots of phyto volume, so I am going with the greenhouse. I hope to have up to 25 bags of phyto, and probably at least one will be contaminant free at any given time!

 

[dave willmore]

By the way my system is basically a gravity fed system as well.

They are directly feeding the mostly dead food. I would feed "œindirectly". My feed would go to the plankton and the plankton would go to the main tank. I hope that having a zooplankton farm in my garage will reduce the over all nutrient load and be more effective at growth corals that like to dine on living plankton.

Of course dreaming is the easy parts. They have success in hand already.

I applaud their success but think we are on a more sustainable track in the long run. They dose massive amounts of dead food on the one hand and remove it on the other hand through skimming. Our live food stays in the tank without all that technology, fits the needs of corals better and also keeps up water quality, we just need more culture water than they do.

I may be a rube, but don't see the need for junctions or flushing unless you have dead food. Why not just drip each type of food into the tank? Perhaps you're dosing dead food to the rotifers and need to clean the lines.

My plan is to aqualift 30 to 50 gallons of concentrated BBS up to a 55 gallon tank and drip feed them with phyto. If I accidentally overfill this holding/enriching tank, it just spills into the main tank. After dark, most of the zooplankton drains into the display so corals will have 12 hours of darkness to feed before the fish clean up the remainder the next morning.

But I'm going for all live food. As a parallel issue, I can't have an impeller pump so my plan is for all the plankton to stay alive all the time until eaten by a fish or polyp. Therefore I can't drain my tank to the sump and them pump the water back up, which would be cost prohibitive on a large system anyway.

I just plan on aqualifting 30 gallons of concentrated BBS from the sump to the display tank each day, and grinding 30 gallons of wet poop from the display tank down to the sump each day. Intuition says that the display tank will trend toward lower nutrients and the sump will trend toward higher nutrients. But few organisms are as hardy as artemia for thriving in that environment.

 

[dave willmore]

Yet another thought. If you are dosing dead phyto to your rotifer and other zooplankton vessels, you will be trending toward higher nutrient levels in your tank because even live zooplankton becomes dead nutrients after it gets eaten. You could remove these with a skimmer but you would also be removing the zooplankton you need. People sometimes handle this by turning skimmer off for feeding then on again for cleaning, but I liken this to putting on a raincoat to take a shower. It seems counterintuitive to me.

There are many ways to solve nutrient problems, my way is with a large algae refugium and many detrivores like sponges. I am hoping that a large variety of macroalgaes and protected amphipod populations will produce lots of plankton of their own, and sponges shed cilia which are a coral food. I read from Sprung/Delbeek that macroalgae spores act as plankton, but elsewhere on this forum I was advised that spores had cell walls too thick to act as plankton. I think variety will be the key.

Just another 2 cents worth, take it or discard it as it may help with your system.

 

[herring_fish]

I use a true dump bucket style Algal Turf Scrubber(ATS). I also have a 55 gallon sump in the garage that has about 8 inches of sand in it (DSB).

The rest of it is full of a special coral rubble from Caribsea that is very porous but not offered for sale. As soon as I brought it on line, the nitrates drop so that my ATS stopped growing algae. Unfortunately, my phosphates are kind of high. I am upgrading my 15 year old RO unit. I hope that will fix the problem.

 

[herring_fish]

Very Rough Testing and Assembly

Very Rough Testing and Assembly

Very Rough Testing

I think that the 6 station switch would be a simpler solution but I am pretty far down the road on this project and I want to see it run before trying to change to the switch. This is the fun part.

This is the first axis. It is designed to move a carriage along the beam from one tube station to the next until it gets to the end where it gets a “go home” command. Then it comes home to the starting point. There is a home stop point where an optical sensor shuts off the motor travel.

There is a calibration function, as well, at the beginning of the program that I do not demonstrate in this video. It uses the sensor to figure out were to start from so that the carriage will find the open holes of the tubes accurately cycle after cycle. This is also valuable after a power outage.

There is an “over travel” sensor at the far end so that it will not burn out anything of all things go haywire.

This is a re-posting of a video that explains the program code that I am using for the Arduino mini-controller.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBPnccwZjO4

This video is when I first got it running. It is sitting on its side and the LED is just sitting next to the motor with loose wires. The program has shortened feeding wait times to make it easier to trouble shoot. I have cycle tested it for 18 hours with no issues including over heating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMpPz_xaEC0&NR=1

This is the second axis. You will see the carriage before I installed the out rigger/rollers but it is functioning as designed. The rollers glide down the metal edge of the rail. The bottom of the carriage is attached to the cable where the springs are.

All it needs to do is lift a small feeding tube out of the mouth of the plankton tube so that the carriage can move to the next station. It is not very glamorous but it is strong enough to do the job.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK4hXVRhH2k

 

[dave willmore]

I use a true dump bucket style Algal Turf Scrubber(ATS). I also have a 55 gallon sump in the garage that has about 8 inches of sand in it (DSB).

The rest of it is full of a special coral rubble from Caribsea that is very porous but not offered for sale. As soon as I brought it on line, the nitrates drop so that my ATS stopped growing algae. Unfortunately, my phosphates or kind of high. I am upgrading my 15 year old RO unit. I hope that will fix the problem.

Again, I see we think alike on the ATS. I don't understand why the porus rubble dropped your nitrates, perhaps it houses enough anaerobic bacteria to convert nitrates into nitrogen gas. The ATS should also handle your phosphates and I don't understand why it isn't. I also think your DSB is a good idea.

My personal philosophy is that algae remove nitrates and phosphates about ten times faster than anaerobic bacteria, you just have to throw a lot of light at the problem. My solution to this is to to recycle lots of screens of filamentous algae to tangs and pygmy angels to eat.

The closer we get to complete nutrient recycling the less food we need to give the tank and the better the water quality. The biggest challenge I see is filtering the nutrient rich brine shrimp water so that it feeds phyto reactors without contamination. Again, I think lots of light is the key. If temps stay moderate at the top of the greenhouse I will put many phyto bags up there for nutrient conversion after a sump full of brine shrimp have already eaten much of my tank waste and turned it into BBS.

 

[lazidog]

rotifers

rotifers

very impressive

 

[dave willmore]

Both your videos are very impressive, especially the second one. It is unusual to see a small motor with that kind of strength.

So despite me trying to tempt you to a low tech system, you have the skills to make high tech solutions that will work. You're light years ahead of what I'm doing.

Congrats on the high quality setup.

 

[herring_fish]

The designer's creed is K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid). I have gotten off of the rails on this one"¦just because I thought that it would be great fun and almost within reach. I would prefer the natural approach but I couldn't pass it up.