Looking for suggestions on an incubator I am designing.

[jb300zx]

Hello fellow bird fanatics. I am designing an incubator (for myself at this point) and would love to get some feedback. The plan is to construct a mid-size, computer controlled incubator with full monitoring and adjustment capabilities via cell phone. My objective is to do so in a manner that will be affordable should anyone else ever want one. Consequently, I would love to hear what features everyone out there would want to see in this device. How many eggs should it hold? Would a likewise monitored/controlled/optional hatcher be preferable? What would you like to monitor other than the obvious parameters? I have been hatching birds for three years now. Other than big incubators that are way out of my price range, my options are limited. I assume others must be in the same position. I hope that I can fix this for us. I know how hard it is hatching our babies around work and kids, etc. This is not a sales pitch. I am genuinely curious for my benefit and (hopefully) yours. Thanks in advance, and happy hatching.

 

[PD-Riverman]

Hello fellow bird fanatics. I am designing an incubator (for myself at this point) and would love to get some feedback. The plan is to construct a mid-size, computer controlled incubator with full monitoring and adjustment capabilities via cell phone. My objective is to do so in a manner that will be affordable should anyone else ever want one. Consequently, I would love to hear what features everyone out there would want to see in this device. How many eggs should it hold? Would a likewise monitored/controlled/optional hatcher be preferable? What would you like to monitor other than the obvious parameters? I have been hatching birds for three years now. Other than big incubators that are way out of my price range, my options are limited. I assume others must be in the same position. I hope that I can fix this for us. I know how hard it is hatching our babies around work and kids, etc. This is not a sales pitch. I am genuinely curious for my benefit and (hopefully) yours. Thanks in advance, and happy hatching.

What you are interested in doing might interest some. Naturally you would want to monitor temp and humidity, maybe monitor that the turner is working. A smell sensor would be Great---incase a egg is going bad. Maybe a little light that would shine on the bad egg----would make finding it faster(just a joke there).

Me I will stick to using my nose and keep my incubator simple(even my hatcher uses a wafer thermostat by choice) to lesson any problems that might happen using a lot of electronic gadgets. When I hatch----I hatch ALOT of eggs---hundreds a week---don't want no problems. Lets see what others say/want??

 

[jb300zx]

I love the suggestion of having a gas sensor for alerting to a bad egg. I also believe keeping things simple is a wise choice as well. I, too, am not willing to rely solely on the electronics. I plan on having a lot of redundancy built into this incubator to prevent losses due to equipment failure. Although the unit will be processor controlled primarily, it will have manual backup devices should the processor fail. My current incubator uses a PID controller for the temp, but it has a backup thermostat just in case.