Tubing
Tubing is an essential element of ZAF because that's how the food gets delivered to the tanks. Therefore, you must be very careful to assemble the tubing carefully to make sure that the different elements, tubes, splitters, connectors are well bound together. Here we provide general considerations and advices on how to set up the tubing for your own ZAF, and give detailed instructions on how to build the tubing splitter panel.
We used two types of tubes: type 1 for connecting pumps valve and food flask inside ZAF, and another: type 2 to hook up the tanks with the splitter panel.
In the following diagram we show how to connect the different pumps and valves together, and what type of tubing you need to use.
Keep in mind to have the same tube lengths for each tank line, i.e the tubes going out of the food flask to bring the food to the two feeding pumps must be of the same length -- this must be true for every downstream connection. This is essential to guarantee an homogeneous food distribution across your tanks.
They are the "hands" of your robot to distribute the food to each tanks. With the separator panel one pump can deliver the food to eight tanks. We decided to limit our panel to eight tanks but with ZAF all is about modularity. If the you want, you can try a panel with 12 outputs --> tanks! The panel support is made of polycarbonate plastic sheet with divider fixed using tube holder suction clips. We used two Y dividers, the type 1 for the first coupling and then the type 2 for the output connections. The middle T connector are from this kit.
All together it is very easy to assembled following the indications on the next figure left panel. On the right it is a picture of the panel inside we build in for our facility. Finally then fastened the panel we used velcro .
Remember each tubes in the setup, must have the same length
