Want to monitor your Coop from your Phone?

[technocoop]

Hi everyone,

I'm an electronics engineer, and for fun, I ended up building a 'bird brain' for my coop that I can monitor and control from my phone. I've been 'egged-on' (sorry sorry) by my friends to see if anyone was interested in giving feedback and let me know if there might be wider interest in my project.

What can 'Bird Brain' do?
- snap pictures of the chickens (but of course!)
- control the door automatically, or via the phone
- monitor the food weight (graphs give good feedback on how well they are eating - I'm a bit of a data geek so it could email daily updates of the coop's health)
- measures temperatures inside, outside and most importantly in the water (to check on freezing)
- I'm currently working on the heater for the water to defrost it for the upcoming winter
- plus it's solar powered so you don't have to run high voltage cables up to your coop

I'm loving building this as a hobby, but if there's more interest I'd love to find a way to devote more time to helping bring tech to the coop (although I'm sure many of you build coops to escape the tech!).

Here's a picture from my phone of a prototype interface (upgrades will show pictures etc). Let me know if this is something you would have interest in (or not), what features you'd most care about, recommendations on where to find people that might be interested (if it had enough interest I'd run a kickstarter campaign).

Thanks again for reading,

Best wishes,

Steve

 

[chickencheeper]

YES!!!! I’d love to have that, I think there would be a huge market for it as long as it’s afordable

 

[sourland]

Hello, Steve, welcome to BYC.

 

[technocoop]

Thanks for the encouragement chickencheeper and to sourland for the welcome

Chickencheeper - I hear your concern about affordability which is why I'm interested in what features would be the highest priority. Each feature requires more electronics (and power consumption for the solar panel - which then would need to be bigger and more costly). Plus I'm thinking it could be modular so people could pick and choose.

I've build a lot of tech projects and counterintuitively it can be helpful to know what people might be willing to pay and work backwards as to what electronics you can pack in for that price. A unit for a few $10s might be pretty limited, one in the $100s range could have a lot more bells and whistles (but maybe no solar etc). It's hard to say till I've worked out the design.

Things that could help would be modular design, knowing what the most important features would be, what people would be willing to spend. Does that help? What features to price would be your guess?

Thanks for your reply. Making my day, daydreaming about continuing to build the birdbrain

 

[Dawnclucks22]

You should legit patent that and sell it for a decent price, I bet you'd get some buyers!

 

[OneMountainAcres]

Welcome to BYC! Glad you've joined us! That's pretty awesome. Something I would definitely be interested in. Maybe haven't additional feeds able to be added on for people with multiple coops?

 

[chickencheeper]

You should get this on Kickstarter or crowdfunding

 

[Kiki]

Welcome to BYC!
Neat project you are working on.

It is not something I would be interested in though, sorry.

 

[FrankieDoodle]

Cool idea!

 

[PirateGirl]

Additional feature, but related to your photo aspect... I'd like to see if predators are in my yard and/or near the coop, so either an additional camera, or motion sensor that gets tripped and sends an alarm to my phone, or something along these lines. If I had hot wire I'd want to be able to see that it is working and hasn't shorted out or something.

I am not interested in the feed weight aspect.

I am interested in temperature in and out of the coop as well as wind speed, I have recently acquired a weather station and I'm contemplating hooking it up at my coop instead of the house (not that they are far apart), but I'm more interested in how the chickens are being affected when I'm not home and can check in on an app.

Many de-icing methods, tank de-icer, heated chicken waterer, heated dog dish, are already thermostatically controlled, but I do wish I could easily just turn mine on and off at night, otherwise the heater will run all night when it's below freezing, but this is not necessary as the chickens aren't drinking at night so it's a waste of electricity.

I know I could likely set all these things up individually, but I like your centralized control idea.

sorry if these are all things you've thought of, just brainstorming

Also I'm not sure how different these features are from other smart home products and systems, can this just be a special app that works with an existing system? As a consumer, why would I buy this vs any of the other smart home products out there? There are already ways to remotely control outlets, lights, cameras, etc., what is different or special or unique about this? Why wouldn't I continue to use an established system? Just things for you to think about if you really want to market it beyond a personal hobby and your personal coop setup.