ZAF Plus Servo and food container

The "kitchen" for ZAF+ is built similarly as for ZAF here: it consists in a servo and a food preparation container. We recommend to use a bigger flat-bottomed flask for water and food mixing. We decided to use a larger container for ZAF+ because we use more water.

We used a servo motor to rotate the food container and distribute a certain amount of dry food pellets to each tank. The system used for ZAF+ is the same described for the ZAF here. Note - we also tested the system with fresh Artemia nauplii and it works well. If your fish diet includes Artemia nauplii, you can use ZAF+ for the food delivery, but you will have to prepare the food daily. For operation with less supervision we recommend using ZAF with dry food.

ZAF+ can control the quantity of food per tank, which is defined in the software using the Graphic User Interface (GUI). We implemented four food quantities: tiny, small, medium, large. Each quantity can be further defined during the GUI calibration depending on the user’s needs. To adjust the amount of food we change the rotation of the servo, and therefore the amount of food delivered to an individual tank.

Based on our dry food seller’s recommendations (we used the Gemma 500 from Skretting ), adult fish need around 15mg of food per day. Therefore, based on this number we calibrated our ZAF+ for:

• Tiny - for 2 to 4 fish approx. 100mg of food delivery
• Small - for 5 to 8 approx. 200mg of food delivery
• Medium - for 9 to 14 approx. 350mg of food delivery
• Large - 15 up to 20 approx. 500mg of food delivery