FED3
We are using FED3 devices to deliver food and quantify intake in the homecage
FED3 are devices were created by Lex Kravitz. If you want to buid one from scratch, here's the list of materials.
Luckily, you can get the electronics from Open Ephys Production site. Link here.
For now, you have to 3D print yourself. Printer quality is important for mechanical devices, it takes around one day to print one.
As of March 2020, Open Ephys is working on finding a 3D printing partner. To be updated.
On the heart of the FED3 devices, there's an Adafruit M0 board. This means you will be using the Arduino IDE for managing code and communicating with the device. Carefully follow the instructions on the hackaday page (link below).
You can find all the relevant information here
Please check the videos for FED device on YouTube
You can use this tool for data analysis.
FED3 devices are powered by batteries that take quite a long time to refill. Although they last for a bit more than a week during operation, they can take up to 2 days to fully charge.
The current solution is to have extra batteries charged. It's a good idea to have extra battery packs charging with this charger. Just swap them on the device when they get low.
FED3 devices ship with a real time clock that needs to be set to a proper time.
To flash/upload sketches, put the Adalogger it into "bootloader" by doing a "double-clicking" on the little reset button on the board. When it is ready to accept code, the red LED on the Adalogger should "breathe" like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ce02eltnIw
I tried to upload sketches in my Ubuntu machine but failed (even though the ports showed the feather m0 board, uploading code yielded "device not found"). I suspect that it has to do with root permissions but I didn't want to struggle for too long with it to find out.
Luckily I had a Windows machine available, so I:
Installed fresh arduino IDE 1.8 copied the libraries (following install guide on hackaday) Configured additional boards manager on Preferences (link to https://adafruit.github.io/arduino-board-index/package_adafruit_index.json) Installed Adafruit SAMD board 1.5.5 (following install guide on hackaday and recent issues) Java 8 (this machine didn't have Java and the first iteration returned a java error)
Uploaded the sketches with no problem. Clock updated, FED3 back to work. Your clock should be good to go until the next daylight savings time messes with your data or the clock's battery dies, whichever comes first!
Your questions will be probably answered if you visit these sites or contact these people.
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Request access to the FED3 google groups. Group link here
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Lex Kravitz
