Automatic Cricket Dispenser

[NavyNate06]

haha this crap gets better and better, i think we might need to change the name on this post to "Go ahead, drink the cool aid"

[MtuPup]

oh this is uncanny...I was just listening to Lewis Black's book. "Me of Little Faith" and he talks about the Jim Jones koolaid mix up....it was actually flavoraid. FYI.

[froggsong]

LMAO... drink the kool-aid indeed... Of course, the kool-aid is only for the non-believers... It's only what they deserve after all... All hail the almighty frog-gods!!! (I'm sure you can hear that in your head in the proper tone of voice...)

[Green Ghost]

Originally Posted by MtuPup

cricket turnstyle like at the train station.

you need to have a one way gate with some time of counter (electrical or mechanical). I've got this image of a cattle yard in my head - the one you'd find at a major commercial meating packing facility where the crickets would be led through a series of gated walkways that lead into the tank. basically forcing the direction of the crowd.

Insects will flee from C02. Eg: If you blow on your crickets they panic and scatter. Might be a way to use that to direct them.

I was working on a fly dispenser (same basic idea as cricket dispenser except for flies) because they could be blown into the viv from another enclosure. I thought that would be fairly easy to do. Thing is, I don't think I'd want the maggots around, so I lost interest in the project. Also flies can squeeze themselves through almost any tiny hole in the viv and get out.

[froggsong]

Hmmm... ok, just a speculative idea here... You could have the crickets contained in something that you could install a light in. Have a separate compartment that would stay totally dark, with a door that operates on a timer/counter. You could have the door between the two compartments open when the light comes on, and have some sort of counter (maybe operated by a laser beam or something?) count the crickets as they move into the dark compartment, and close the door between the two when there are as many as you want in the dark chamber. When the door closes, the light turns off. At this point, you could have the dark compartment dump into the vive. Maybe the whole floor could open and dump them in from the top or something. Of course, this would likely be very expensive to construct, but it would be cool as hell to see in operation, lol...

[Waterkeeper]

I don't think this thing is really that expensive to create(define expensive?)
I remember somebody who really knew their electrical engineering duplicating the ReefKeeper(a $500 piece of equipment) for under 100 bucks.

How does the beam know the difference between the cricket entering the tube, or going back into the box?

[MtuPup]

you'd have to set up a set of at least 2 break-beam sensors - then compensate for that senario in the code. Of course to be more accurate keep adding sensors. So when you have sensors 1 then 2 then 3 all trigger make the count. if it goes 1-2-1...don't count.

[froggsong]

LOL, EVERYTHING is expensive to me... Had to get a job to help pay for the hobby...

[Green Ghost]

Crickets are also attracted to heat so if there were 2 areas and one of them had the crickets in there, a heat pad could be placed on a timer to warm up the 2nd area and that would attract the crickets. Then put the sensors between the 2 areas. When enough crickets were in the the 2nd area the heat pad could turn off and the trap door open. - with crickets hanging on for dear life

[strange_screams]

I had thought of the idea too, Because I have 4 habitats that need crickets daily and well...I'm lazy. What made me abandon the idea though was not the complexity of the contraption or whatnot. I tried keeping tubes for the crickets to hide in thinking that it would be easy to just pick up tube in the cricket habitat and then shake into the frogs tank....but after seeing how many crickets just crawled into the tubes to die I decided that they would do the same in any tubes running from the cricket habitat to the frogs.