Cheap Cheep: A Low-Cost Automatic Incubator for Family Farms

Abstract

The goal of this project is to design and build a cheap, simple, and automatic incubator for family farms. Simple incubators, while cheap, are difficult to manage because the temperature and humidity must be constantly tweaked by the user. Automatic egg incubators, while requiring almost no user input, are very expensive (about $700). This incubator is around $100, has automatic temperature control, egg turning, and status update tweets. Temperature control is achieved through an Arduino nano, which uses gains determined by the Ziegler- Nichols tuning method to turn on a solid state relay connected to a heat lamp. Egg-turning is achieved through a novel "shifting oor" design, featuring a slot mechanism attached to servo motors to shift the floor beneath the eggs. Egg-turning stops automatically at 18 days for hatch "lockdown". An ethernet shield is used to tweet status updates and warn the user if a problem occurs. Through logging data, we found that the incubator has good temperature control, egg-turning capabilities, and informative tweets.