Fish Ninja monitors home aquarium to help keep fish alive

Kathy Jennings | Thursday, August 22, 2013

For beginning and intermediate aquarium owners maintenance can be daunting to the point that it becomes the reason they give up their home fish tanks. Fish Ninja wants to be the answer for these fish fans.

Nate Norman, studying Sales and Business Marketing at WMU, has been working on Fish Ninja with Mike Roussin, an Engineering Management Master's student, and Charles Washburn, studying Engineering Design Technology at WMU. At the Starting Gate Demo Day, Norman described the work they have accomplished on Fish Ninja since coming up with the idea of developing a way to help keep fish alive.

They wanted a device that would attach to the tank and would feed the fish, measure water temperature, include a camera to allow aquarium owners to watch the fish when they are not home and see that they are feeding properly, provide outlets for lights and notify the aquarium owner if steps needed to taken, such a changing the water in the tank.

Working with the Kalamazoo product design consulting firm Tekna, they developed a prototype that could do many of the tasks they originally envisioned. Tekna allowed the team to use its 3-D printer to create the fish feeder. The software needed for the monitoring also is nearly complete.

The feeder and monitoring system is ideal for a tanks of 20 to 150 gallons and would cost about $170.

As they investigated what they hoped would be a key selling point for their product they found that notifying the aquarium owners of unsafe nitrite levels was not feasible at this time. They discovered only waste water treatment plants have the kind of monitors they need to measure nitrites and those are prohibitively expensive. That aspect of the system will not be included until much more research is conducted, Norman said.

During the question and answer period of the demonstration, the Fish Ninja team was encouraged to talk to more potential customers.

Norman said the next step for the team is evaluating the intellectual property they have created to see if they can obtain patents. From there, they hope to find a distribution deal with a major national pet store chain, such as Petsmart or PetCo.

Writer: Kathy Jennings, Second Wave Media
Source: WMU Starting Gate Demo Day