Week 1: Computer-Aided Design

Assignment

Create a design using CAD for the final project

Project: Smart Aquarium!

I wanted to get started on the automatic fish feeder aspect of my smart aquarium.

Process

I had pretty limited experience in CAD, so I decided to get Fusion and start playing around with things. I realized I wanted the feeder to be something like a funnel that goes to a water wheel controlled by a servo to feed the fish. The main challenges were:

• Figuring out the holes in the water wheel
• Making sure the wheel could turn freely, and deciding if i wanted to separately print the funnel, or connect it to the casing.

Inspiration for water wheel feeder

I found the specs online of the Servo motor and fan, and decided to incorporate the funnel (where you add food) into the fish shell, but print the water wheel separately since this was such a key component of the project. This gave me the opportunity to retry this part if it didn't work. It ended up being about a 2hour print on the Prusa MK3 at the SEC. The connection was a little loose to the Servo fans so that's something I'd change in the future but it did indeed spin and dispense food as I had hoped!

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