Anyone up for a little Red Neck engineering?.

[growinupinfl]

Ok, ya'll know more about parts of appliances, and wiring than anyone else I know... We have a debate about a hen sitting on her eggs.

The history of the story is, when you artifically incubate chicken eggs, For the first 18 days you HAVE to rotate them every couple of hours for proper development.  Then  three days before they hatch you have to put them in what is called "lock down". That is when you do not open the incubator, or rotate the eggs and have to jack up the humidity to over 80%.

 Several of us wierdo's who like chickens and hatching our own eggs want to know if a mother hen stops getting off her eggs and stops rotating her eggs.  We can not find any studies or information that tells us.  So we want to know what the real momma chicken does.  I have two hens who are sitting on eggs day 18 will be on Nov. 4th.  I want to device something that will let me know if they leave their nest..

Here is some of the idea's I've/We've had on how to do this..

1) putting a sensor mat under the hen.  But the only ones I know of alarm when someone applies pressure not removes.

2) Hooking up a light/ motion sensor light switch.  Attach a lamp/light running through the sensor that will turn off when the hen leaves the nest.

3) Any other weird miss used device I can think of and haven't applied enough though to yet.  I am not above buying parts of something... I don't know if there  is any other device that I could put in or under the hen to detect her movement.

I'm calibrating a hygrometer that I will be able to go in the nest to measure humidity.  I just really want to try making something like this...

Here is the picture of the girls current accommodations... There is a door that swings shut basically right in their face!

Anyone up for the challenge?

[BrntToast]

how about a small USB temperature recorder, it should record a change in temp every time the chicken gets up and sits down

somewhere we have a post for one that is only 7 dollars, i dont know how sensitive that one is though

my last recorder was an ACR and you could modify it's sample rate to record as often as you wished, the more often it takes a sample the less days it records before it rewrites data

or you could set up a camera to record and watch the video later

 

[RegUS_PatOff]

[user=20728]BrntToast[/user] wrote:

..somewhere we have a post for one that is only 7 dollars,

http://applianceguru.com/forum9/23679.html

$ 7 would work, although the "Thermometer" is in the USB "thumb device" and it's not wireless,

and would need to be connected to computer or laptop.

$ 12 same non-wireless, but has a temperature "probe"

$ 36 stand-alone (rechargable) w/probe and w/ 100,000 measurement logs and adjustable intervals

software charts and/or graphs

[SANTA]

A "bouncing betty" would work. Oh, wait a minute, that would only work once.

[kdog]

You could just video record and speed up time lapse - maybe you could sell copies to "recoup" expenses. Ya never know as someone hit the bigtime recording a burning fireplace for Christmas entertainment

[RegUS_PatOff]

[user=637]kdog[/user] wrote:

You could just video record and speed up time lapse - maybe you could sell copies to "recoup" expenses. Ya never know as someone hit the bigtime recording a burning fireplace for Christmas entertainment

I had thought about that ... but

Then  three days before they hatch you have to put them in what is called "lock down". 

 

a 3 day video tape ?

 

OR maybe record to a computer video card / hard drive