Tubing
Tubing delivers food to the to the tanks and are therefore and essential elements of the device. You must carefully designed and assemble the tubing elements (i.e, tubes, splitters, connectors) to prevent any problems during the food distribution. We provide general a general framework on how setting up the tubing for your ZAF, and provide detailed instructions on how we build the tubing splitter panel. The tubing splitter panel is a key elements to separate the flow of food+water and administer a homogeneous amount of food to the different tanks.
Make sure to use tubes that are safe for the fish and that are rigid enough to prevent their cloaking. 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 this schematic graph we indicate how to connect the different pumps and valves together, and what type of tubing we used.
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 the homogeneous food distribution across your tanks.
These are the "hands" of your robot that will disseminate and homogeneous amount of food to each tank. In the described design, one separator panel and one pump can deliver food to eight tanks. We decided to limit our panel to eight tanks but with ZAF it is all about modularity. If the you want, you can try a panel with 12 tanks! However, take into consideration that the more splitting the stronger the pump must be and the higher the chance that some tubes will clog -- resulting in bad food distribution. Scaling up to many more tanks is recommended with ZAF-next.
The panel support is made of polycarbonate plastic sheet with dividers fixed using tube holder suction clips. We used two Y-dividers, the type 1 tubes for the first coupling and then the type 2 tubes for the output connections. The middle T-connector are from this kit.
Overall, it should be easy to assemble the panel by following the indications on the following figure (left panel). On the right it is a picture of the panel inside the facility. Finally, we fastened the panel using velcro stripes.
Remember: all tube lines, one for each tank, must all have the same lengths
