For the past few years, I have been playing a bit with the microcomputer Arduino. In fact, I have actually learned how to code using the simplified Arduino C language. And this year, I saw a great opportunity to make a bigger projects. Every year in our school, we have to pick a topic that we make a project from. We have a whole year to finish the projects, and it leads to some great ideas being brought to light.

This year, me and 2 of my friends saw a great opportunity to learn something about these kinds of projects, and to also solve a problem that my friend had for a long time.

The problem

Imagine you have a lot of lizards at home (my friend does!), and you travel somewhere on the holiday. How will the lizards be fed? Well, we had the idea of an automatic farm for insects that would feed the lizard. Of course, we knew this is a huge project, but decided to do it anyway, since for the yearly projects, there is no guarantee we actually finish the project, and it seemed like a cool idea.

Our Solution

Because we are just 3 friends doing something and not a huge corporate, we just had meetings when everyone had time. At the start, everyone was really hyped so we had our first meeting only few days after submitting the project theme request.

First meeting

On our first meeting, we had to pick the right insect to farm, because the whole farm design relies heavily upon that. My friend is the biologist of our group, so he proposed 5 different species:

  • Blaptica dubia(dubia roach)
  • Tenebrio molitor(Mealworm)
  • Acheta domestica(House Cricket)
  • Schistocerca gregaria(Desert Locust)
  • Zophobas morio(Giant Mealworm) Our job for the meeting was to just pick the right one. This is roughly how we were thinking:

Dubia Roach

The Dubia roach

The dubia roach has one giant problem: It is extremely invasive. We excluded it from the list almost immediately. Imagine you are going on a holiday, and when you return the whole house is destroyed and millions of roaches are marching through the remains. Seems like not the thing you would want.

Mealworm

skibidu