I HAVE A GREAT INVENTON IDEA

[cary 1973]

ok so reading and with my few little mini heart attacks when i cant find a chicken some one needs to invent gps tracking system for chickens somthing small that can be attached to a feather or like a dog right under the skin that emeits a small signal where if your chicken goes missing you can walk around with some kind of device and find it thourhg the gps. now only if i had the brains to know how to do it.

 

[DTchickens]

I think doing as done with dogs would be the easiest route; attaching it to feathers would be difficult as birds preen themselves/lose feathers and as a result would probably lose the tracking system.

Another possible solution would be to develop a leg or wing band that has a small micro-chip on it, but in actuality.. How much would it cost to make, then how much would it cost to buy? Different sizes would have to be available for different sized legs in the case of leg bands. A lot of people have a lot of chickens, compared to say someone who has a few dogs they want to micro-chip, which I think would be why most haven't worried so much about coming up with a tracking system.

God bless,
Daniel.

 

[Bobby65]

That would be very cool need it to work on my smart phone so you can see them wile away

 

[cary 1973]

Very good idea about smart phone

 

[Bear Foot Farm]

Quote: There are no GPS devices that small.
Those chips are "RFID" and can only be read with a scanner held close to them

The smallest actual GPS devices are about the size of a wrist watch

 

[lesliedow]

I've been thinking along these lines as well. I've had some bad moments when I did not know where my chickens were, You could put RFID chips into legbands and get a USB reader to write to a Raspberry Pi.

Now RFID is only going to scan them when they walk past it. But the Raspberry Pi's are cheap enough that I was thinking of putting one on the coop to the yard door, and one on their ususal path to beg for goodies. I think I can run them off a small solar panel and a battery like the PulletShut door guys do. Maybe one on the other side of the house, as well or at the bottom of our property. Not sure. Raspberry Pis are tiny and dont need much power. The programming would be simple enough, just log the "detect chicken" event, chicken ID, and time (location is impled byt the Pi that logged it. Then send that to an email addy or a website. You would then know when each of your flock passed a certain location and what time.

It would at least give me some sense of where they were when last sighted.

I'm giong to work on this and I'll post about cost and complexity.

I love it when chickens cross technology!

Leslie