Food restriction schedule with FED

[Miguel (myguestp)]

Hi all,

It was considering getting some FED3 devices to implement food restriction experiments. As many of you probably know, when mice are caloric restricted and the whole amount of food is delivered at the same time, they usually eat it in a half an hour and the rest of the period the mice are in fasting.

I was wondering how easy is to programm a FED3 device to deliver food in a time controlled way. I mean, how feasible it is to program the device to deliver, for example, one pellet each 2 hours. For this, i woudnt need any nose poke response, just programming the food delivery in time. Is that possible?

Thanks in advance,

Miguel

[Lex]

Hi Miguel,

Yup that's possible!  The FED3 detects when the pellet is taken by the mouse so you could program it to dispense a maximum of 5 pellets per hour or whatever would produce the right level of restriction for your experiments.  Best, -Lex

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[Miguel (myguestp)]

Hi, 

Thanks for your answer. But, could be possible to let the pellet drop at a fixed time frequency without any nose poke stimulus, right?

Best,

Miguel

[Lex]

Yes that's possible. FED3 dispenses pellets into its pellet well (red arrow below), which monitors the pellet so FED3 can log the time when the pellet is removed.  FED3 will not drop another pellet while there is already a pellet in the well so that pellets don't pile up and jam. So you could have FED3 dispense a pellet every 10 minutes, but skip it if the mouse didn't take the prior pellet.

Or if you want to just drop pellets into the cage at a regular interval, independent of whether the mouse eats them you can remove the pellet well (or not install it if you're assembling your own).  And then program FED3 to drop a pellet every 10 minutes or whatever the interval is. Hope this clears it up!

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[Cesar Vargas]

I actually just made this exact modification a couple weeks ago. I currently have it where you can provide X number of pellets every Y hours. Pellet limit and intervals can be updated on the start screen by holding both nose pokes (similar to setting the FED number). Set values are then saved at the next start up. Happy to share the Sketch and modified code! Not sure if best to attach here or share separately?

[Lex Kravitz]

Cool!  Cesar if you want to share it you can submit it here and I can add it to the Github wiki under "community code", referencing you of course.  It would be cool to build up a repository of code like this and start including it in future FED3 library updates as well.

[Cesar Vargas]

Oh great, I'll make sure to submit! If the .cpp and .h files are also modified (new functions and variables), is there a way to append that? The form says it only takes .ino

[Lex]

Oh cool you edited the library!  I modified the upload form so you can submit .cpp and .h files too.  

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[Miguel (myguestp)]

Thanks very much for all your help, I would be very happy to see the modifies code to implement once we got once of this FED devices.

Best,

Miguel

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