Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Vol. 5, No. 3, March 2017, pp. 564 ~ 568 DOI: 10.11591/ijeecs.v5.i3.pp564-568  564 Received November 22, 2016; Revised February 13, 2017; Accepted February 27, 2017 An Automated Feeding System for Soft Shell Crab Muhammad Niswar* 1 , Zahir Zainuddin 2 , Yushinta Fujaya 3 , Zagita Marna Putra 4 1,2,4 Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering 3 Department of Fisheries, Faculty of Marine Science and Fisheries, Hasanuddin University, Makassar, Indonesia Corresponding author, e-mail: niswar@unhas.ac.id*, zagitanank@gmail.com Abstract Soft shell crab farming has been practiced in south-east Asian countries such as Indonesia. Soft shell crabs are harvested when they have just molted to prevent their shells from being hardened. An issue arises when feeding the crabs. Farmers need to feed the crabs 5% food of their body weight. However, farmers sometimes provide incorrect amounts of food to the crabs. If farmers feed the crab exceeding the required amounts of food, it causes food wastage and dirty water in the crabs’ cage. On the other han d, less amounts of food cause slow growth and molting of the crabs. In this study, we developed an automated feeding system for properly feeding of soft-shell crabs. The automated feeding system schedules the feeding time and controls the portion of food using a microcontroller. We also developed a web-based monitoring system to monitor and generate alert message to farmers to make sure that feeding process runs properly. Keywords: Automation, Microcontroller, Soft Shell Crab, Feeding, Web-based Application Copyright © 2017 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Soft-shell crab is a popular food in the United States, China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and some countries in Europe. Crab commodity is a very promising business sector for the community in Asia, hence, farming of soft shell crab has been practiced in south-east Asian countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Philippines. Soft shell crabs are harvested when they have just molted to prevent their shells from being hardened. To growth the crabs, farmers need to feed the crabs with accurate portion of food. When feeding a dry food, farmers need to feed the crabs 5% food of their body weight [1]. However, farmers sometimes provide incorrect amounts of food to the crabs. Such exceeding feed results in food wastage and dirty water in the crabs’ cage, hence, the crabs may be sick from drinking the dirty water. On the other hand, if farmers feed the crabs less than the required amounts of food, there will be slow growth and molting of the crabs. Therefore, we need an automation system to feed the crabs properly and accurately based on the required amount of food. The automation system is a technology that combines the use of mechanics, electronics, sensors and computer application to run a process with less human interference. Automation is basically used to help human beings do the routine, because human being has limitations in terms of precision, unlike machine/computer [2]. There are several studies on automated system for aquaculture and agriculture. References [3] and [4] developed an autonomous robot for agriculture. Reference [5] proposed a PI-based and fuzzy logic-based control system for measuring and controlling the light levels for the indoor hatcheries and nurseries in aquaculture. Reference [6] designed fish feeder system using PIC Microcontroller and it is operated by inputting the desired time the fish will be fed. Reference [7] developed a fish feeder using PIC microcontroller allowing the fish to be fed at the right cycle time as predefined by the user. Reference [8] developed an automatic feeding control for dense aquaculture fish tanks. In this study, we developed an automated feeding system for soft shell crab using microcontroller. This paper describes the hardware and software design of our proposed automated feeding system. Furthermore, we also evaluated the performance of our automated feeding system.