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- Category: 2022 system (v2)
If you want eggs, you need happy, health hens and in turn, they need good food and fresh water and somewhere dry, clean and safe to live.
Ours hens regularly get all sorts of kitchen scraps from vegetables peelings. Stick them in a pan, heat them up for a couple of minutes, let them cool and you have a tasty food source that they really love from items you would, without Chickens, put in the compost bin, so its effectively free food that turns into eggs. The hens always come running to the pen door when they see you coming with the plastic pots full of food.
- Details
- Category: 2022 system (v2)
All the recent work has been focused on getting the coop prepared and repaired, then installing the new hardware. As a result, some things had to give and were not completed before installation, this is not a problem as software updates are easy compared to all the maintenance and hardware installation. One casualty of the installation milestone was the front panel, since it got complicated and the amount of code and re-testing was going to be fairly high. To understand this, lets start by reviewing how the front panel works.
- Details
- Category: 2022 system (v2)
One of the things that I was unhappy about on the old coop was that the pan and tilt webcam, controlled the interior lighting via a couple of 1 Watt LED's. The idea was to keep power levels low and make the light directional to whatever the Webcam was looking at. However, the wavelength of the light wasn't in the same range as the webcam, so although it technically worked, the camera was soon abandoned as other things were more important to fix first. Also, being an internal webcam, it didn't cope well with life outside. The microphone quickly got gummed up with dirt.
- Details
- Category: 2022 system (v2)
After a significant amount of time and effort, its finally time to bring up Chicken Coop version 2. Its a year later than I had originally planned, but life's priorities change and last years summer was virtually non-existent which prevented the required maintenance and that is a pre-requisite for the install, so we are where we are. On the positive side though, the new Electronics and its firmware are much better with many additional features and a handful of undetected bugs and a couple of known ones too.
- Details
- Category: 2022 system (v2)
The time had finally, a year later than originally planned, to start the upgrade, things were nearly ready, the new boards and firmware were working well enough to get them into the Chicken Coop, but one fairly significant blocker still remained. The state of the Chicken Coop itself.
This needed careful planning. Unlike the first time around, where I had an old coop and a new coop and cut-over was simply preparing the new coop with the wood preservatives, waiting for it to dry, then swapping the units over followed by the installation of the electronics. This time, its a live upgrade - literally as the hens need somewhere dry and safe to roost for the night, each night during the upgrade, but the maintenance list is quite long and will take several consecutive days of dry weather. It needs :