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PCB Round 2 testing complete!

A project log for Feeding Experimentation Device 3 (FED3)

Version 3 of our home-cage feeding device, FED. FED3 includes nosepokes and stimuli for behavioral training.

lex-kravitzLex Kravitz 05/24/2018 at 12:081 Comment

Mohamed populated the new PCBs over the last week and they are working great!  To recap, these boards include:

  1. Three Sharp Photo-Interrupters (2 will be operant "pokes", and one will be used to detect pellets that are dispensed
  2. One stepper motor controller and 5V stepper motor for moving the pellet dispensing disk
  3. One  Sharp low-power memory LCD display
  4. One 8 LED Neopixel strip
  5. One beeper for auditory feedback
  6. One Feather Adalogger M0 board to control the device and save data

The idea for this improvement to FED2.0 is that this will be a true "platform" device, that can be flashed with different code to function differently.  So one code can make it act like FED2.0, while other code can deliver more complex operant paradigms for training mice.  

We confirmed that all hardware on this PCB rev is operational, but (of course!) we want to make a couple tweaks before we mass produce.  We want to make it a bit easier to solder - a couple components were too close, and we want to move the location of the screen.  Overall this will provide a lot more functionality than FED2.0, while being much easier to assemble and taking up ~1/2 the space!  

Discussions

Sophi Kravitz wrote 05/29/2018 at 10:09 point

Looks good Lex! I like that you'll use one hardware for multiple software/ applications. 

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