One of my teammates started a print of the first version of the frame for the inventory system device. The printer ran overnight and I picked up the model this afternoon. The top part of the frame is the spool holder. It carries the RFID board to read the tag on the spool. The bottom […]
Finishing the crust and covering the insulating the top of the biomeiler was going to require more shavings than I had in the storage bin. So, I got a load of shavings on Saturday and added them to the biomeiler on Sunday, after I got home from church. It was good that I got the
Biomeiler Crust Complete Read More »
The circuit and code that allows the Raspberry Pi to control an RFID reader/writer is now working. I had to solder leads onto the reader/writer board, but that was the hardest part of building the circuit. It has been some time since I did any electronics-type soldering. Having older eyes makes it a little
In order to move the cots to the coop, I first needed to empty at least one of the quail pens. There was no point in dividing up the job so I harvested all the adult quail at once. Three quail don’t amount to much meat, but it takes little effort to clean them. It
The Last Quail Harvest Read More »
Quail are not intelligent birds. That has always been clear. However, one of the cots just distinguished itself to win a Darwin Award. Last night, after feeding the cots, I counted heads and one was missing. I looked all around the basement, thinking it had somehow gotten out of the pen. Every few hours, I
Today, I completed building a circuit that can find the weight of an object. It works by collecting the readings from three force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) and passing them through an analog-to-digital converter. The FSRs are the dark, paddle-shaped things standing up from the breadboard. Once the frame is built, the FSRs will support the weight
Getting the PEX pipes into the coop without drilling holes in the walls was the goal. My solution was to use my angle grinder to cut flaps in the wye fitting outside the coop and in the air duct inside the coop, before the intake fan. The cutting went pretty smoothly. Fortunately, the wye fitting
Biomeiler Attached to Coop Read More »
To measure temperatures in the biomeiler, I buried thermocouples in strategic locations. This is an ideal way to measure temperatures in such a situation. The way a thermocouple works is that two types of metal are welded together and that junction is placed at the location where the temperature is to be measured. At
Thermocouple Issues Read More »
During the week, we had six more cots hatch. Unfortunately, the last three had leg and foot problems. We have seen, in the past, that late hatchers have a higher percentage of leg problems. Two of the three died on their own. One had legs that stayed straight and had toes that wouldn’t uncurl. Because
Yesterday, one of the quail eggs from the last shipment hatched in the afternoon. By bedtime, there were some more. This morning there were six cots all dried off and ready to move to the brooder table. The two cots from the last hatch are not fully feathered, but they are too big to be