Auto fish food dispenser

[br3yd3n007]

Hi all

Ok so i have been coming up with ideas for a way to auto feed my fish using a raspberry pi. I think i have the mechanical part mostly complete and i want to use servos to control two gates on the design. I want to have the pi running 24/7 then at certain times during the day it dispenses food into the tank. I am very new to coding and my only project before this one was a time lapse device using the raspberry pi camera that took photos every 10 seconds, very basic programming. I am also unsure of how to connect the servos to the pi, like i have done a bit of research and most people are running the servos with external power supply's. But i am still very confused about which pins do what and where wires should connected.

So basically i am asking how to first connect wires to the GPIO pins on the board and then have a python script that is constantly running and will dispense food at a certain time each day. Even if you could just help with the script part of this project that would be great.

Thanks in advance

[NorwegianClassic]

I guess you are looking for someone to explain this for you, but I am new to this my self and just tried it out so sorry, but if you have a PWM servo you can use PWM pins on your rpi to control it.

Check out this: http://razzpisampler.oreilly.com/ch05.html

It's all I have right now, but hope it helps.

[quickjs1]

Hi - This is my first post. I know you asked about the Raspberry Pi speciffically. I am new to the Pi, but thought I would pass along my project:
I built an automated fish tank controller about 4 years ago and it still operates today.
However I am using an Arduino, was an UNO then switched to the Pro Mini. It has a RTC and controls the light, filter pump, and bubbler. The feeder is a linear stepper motor that operates a plunger, when it retracts, a small amount of food drops out of the hopper tube. Then a servo motor opens a sliding door underneath the port that the stepper pushes the food out of. The sliding door keeps moisture from getting the food stored in the hopper wet. Then the sliding door closes again. The variables I provide provide are the times of day the light is on / off and the times of day the feeding happens. During feeding the filter pump and bubbler turns off (no need to draw the food in to the filter. After 2 minutes the bubbler and filter pump turns back on. When the light is off the bubbler also turns off. Not sure how well the Pi would run this but the Arduino is perfect. If the power fails the Arduino picks up where it left off, So far I have to restart the python script that I am running to read a pressure / temp sensor if the power cycles off and back on on my Pi.
The hopper contains enough food to feed the fish 3 times a day (small amounts that they can eat in 2 minutes) and will last 2 weeks. Also after about 2 weeks the fish know that when the bubbler and filter pump turn off they are about to get food, and they assemble near the sliding door.