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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

TheNextWeb damn near killed my browser, and it's just an ad-laden article about the fish-food thing instead of the fish-food thing itself, which can be found at https://www.aquard.io/

I'm not at all certain the fish are real either.

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"I'm not at all certain the fish are real either."

This is 2014. Assuming a decent level of development skills, it is not like this is so amazing that it just has to be faked. Hooking up webcams to the internet and hooking up a few web buttons to some real equipment via an Arduino is so easy I can't help but think it's actually easier to set this up for real than convincingly fake it in front of an Internet audience!

Seriously, folks, turn the cynicism knob down a bit. And I'm a cynic myself.

It seems not just easier to really do it, but tremendously easier. If it's fake, that's probably more impressive!

Eh, I dunno, you could just put the feeder on a timer and not have to deal with scaling issues of allowing thousands of people to manage one feeding apparatus.

The control being faked is plenty plausible. The fish being faked is what I was responding to.

Hello there, I am Thomas, one of the guys involved in the development of aquard.io. The fish are real and the feeding is FCFS (first came - first served) based. We designed the logic based on an estimate of ~50 concurent users. So it does not work well (for interactions) when massive users are online. 300 Users to One Physical Object :/. Feel free to ask me anything related to the project and from the side of the team thanks for enjoying it!

It's a cool project! Don't take the above to mean I think the control part is faked.

As i told before, the control part is not faked. We have a dedicated PC communicating with an Arduino UNO via a Serial port (USB). PC gets (web) requests forwards it to Arduino and then it controls the airpump and the feeder.

Yeah, I said I don't believe it was faked.

I am sorry that my idle speculation became the top comment. At least it amounted to flattery.

It is indeed much easier to do it for real than to fake, although I suspect if you used real footage of fish as sprites that would largely do the trick. My theorized motivation was more along the lines of "social experiment/proof of prowess/sense of humor" than "easy route".

After a second visit and careful observation I am convinced the fish are indeed real - one swam very close to the camera so it couldn't have been a sprite, and I've also spotted a few shadows cast by the fish onto scene geometry.

The lagginess of the webcam leads me to believe that it's real, also I saw a couple of fish stop and eat algae off of a rock. A 3D simulation (which the company does do) would hopefully have better performance.

Is it safe to feed fish every hour? That seems excessive.

I use to have this screensaver running, it's very nice. I'm not sure if it's been updated in a while though. http://www.dreamaquarium.com/

Maybe its just recordings of the fish being fed.

Fish normally (=in the wild) graze all day. So long as they aren't being overfed, feeding them every hour is perfectly fine.

I haven't looked at the feeding yet, so I can't comment on whether the amount of food is small enough.

"Never feed him a lot. Never more than a spot! Or something may happen. You never know what." (Childhood memory successfully recalled. That's from A Fish out of Water, a Dr. Suess "I can read it all by myself" series book almost precisely as old as I am, penned by Suess's wife, Helen.)

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