Alarm LED

[Hamid Taghipour]

Hello!

I am planning to install an "Alarm LED" on our FEDs. This would be an LED on the housing of the FEDs that signals some activities in FEDs to ensure the device is running properly, especially in case of jamming it helps us to easily spot that  FED unit among many other cages in the colony room. Does anybody have experience with this?

Best.

Hamid Taghipourbibalan

Ph.D. Fellow in Behavioral Neuroscience, Mccutcheonlab, UiT, Tromsø, Norway

[Matias Andina]

Hello,

I considered this a while back and decided that going the software way is easier than the hardware way. This is why we developed FEDWatcher and built a jam alert into FEDWatcher.

https://github.com/matiasandina/FEDWatcher

We were initially planning to trigger an email alert, but realized that dealing with dual factor authentication and having your email password stored locally would be problematic.

Something that would be nice to add is automation in the form of text messages. See this thread below

https://github.com/matiasandina/FEDWatcher/issues/5

Growing this notification system can easily account for other events, such as low battery or a certain pellet event. It also has the advantage of notifying more than one person.

I do not have the working hours or full knowledge to devote myself to this right now, but would love to collaborate on improving FEDWatcher. Please reach out if you are interested.

Best,

Matias

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[Lex]

Hi Hamid!

An external LED to signal an error state sounds like a great idea.  Matias' FED3Watcher is a good solution too!  But if you want a stand-alone LED on each FED3 it is very easy to attach an LED to the output port.  I often connect an LED to visually test new pulsing schemes. Here's a BNC port-FED3 with an LED on the BNC port:

Or on the newer 3.5mm audio port you can make the external LED a bit smaller:

You can connect any simple 2-wire LED to the port.  Just connect the positive lead of the LED to the positive terminal of the BNC or audio jack, and the negative to the ground terminal. Now you can call fed3.BNC(delay, number); to blink the LED whenever you want.  You could also just turn it on by calling digitalWrite(14, HIGH) if/when the FED3 jams (ie: motorturns > 30), or the battery is getting low (ie: measuredvbat <3.6).  Post back if you get this going and it's useful!   

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