VIDEO: Watch the lemurs using the smart feeder!

 

Lemurs investigating the smart feeder. Note food at the bottom of the device.

On Sunday, August 30, 2015, the Lemur Smart Feeder team gathered at the Oakland Zoo lemur exhibit to see how the lemurs would react to the device. As you'll see in the video, below, this 'test' was a resounding success!

The device worked as expected (distributed food on its own, with timing provided by the Arduino board) (yay!), the lemur were almost immediately (within one minute) attracted to the feeder and grabbed food out of it (hooray!), and we learned some valuable information for the building of the actual devices, such as: 1) the opening through which the lemurs will grab the food must be larger (about 3 inches high instead of 1 inch) and 2) the smart feeders must be level in order for the servo to be able to spin the PVC pipe, which lead Darren Minier and David Jaffe to map out where in the exhibit each device should go.

Please take 2 minutes to watch our video. We hope you'll be as intrigued and excited about the lemurs' interaction with the smart feeder as we are, and that you'll share this video with your friends, and maybe decide to donate to our project so that we can build the eight smart feeders we need to enrich the lives of the lemurs and study how their behavior changes. Thanks!