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ZAF stands for 'Zebrafish Automatic Feeding', it is an easy to build device that can automate fish feeding for your fish facility -- with minimal supervision. ZAF is an open access project with both hardware and software designs openly provided. We give all instructions for building ZAF leveraging only commercially available parts. ZAF is designed to be maximally accessible for non-experts in electronics, mechanics and robotics -- we avoided complex parts, 3D printing, advanced electronics and tried to keep the design simple.
ZAF comes in two version: first, there is the original ZAF which is very easy to build, but has some limitations (see below), ZAF+ addresses most shortcoming of ZAF-easy, has a more advanced design, but is also harder to build. ZAF+ has the key advantage that it can control the amount of food you provide to each tanks in your facility. We give instructions for both versions because we believe that different fish facilities and different users will have different needs and skills.
We provide a graphic user interface, to help the user running is own feeding program. We tried our ZAFs with both dry and solid food and it works perfectly well. ZAF can help you overcome staffing issues during weekend and holidays and associated with remote camera can work completely autonomously. Additionally, while manual feeding isn't very accurate, ZAF+ can control the amount of food per tank depending on the fish numbers. In the main paper we showed that ZAF and ZAF+ are good for fish health and reproduction rate and did not affect the water quality of the fish rack. All together we hope that ZAF technologies will help to facilitate the establishment of fish colony in labs and will push zebrafish research in a new era.
The main limitation of ZAF is that it lacks precise control of the amount of food. ZAF distributes the same homogenised mix of food and water to al tanks. If you have in a tank 12 fish and in another 6, with ZAF they will receive the same amount of food. In practice we have used ZAF successfully in our facility and found it to be very beneficial for general feeding during the weekend and holidays. However ZAF+ will be in the long term more beneficial because it can precisely distribute a certain amount of food per tank. ZAF+ is builds upon the existing modules of ZAF but adds better flow control and food quantity regulation based on more efficient pumps and a valves system.
So, after ZAF is you feel adventurous, we strongly recommend you to build ZAF+, a slightly more complex device, but offering more advance features.
You will find the details protocol to build your own ZAF and ZAF+. Both share a common design principles: ZAF+ is designed as an extension of ZAF. Thus, even though we present two independents manuals for both, they share some common modules such as the food mixing.
The manuals for ZAF-easy and ZAF-next are divided in three main part
- The hardware
- The electronics
- ZAF control software
