IoT Farm: Blog 10 - Another day, another 5 chickens...

26 Aug 2016

This Morning's Bounty of Fowl investments! The 3 on top are Duck eggs, only 1 was laid today but I wanted to give comparison for size to the Chicken Eggs. The Element 14 pen is also for size comparison.

But John, you don't have any Chicken's laying yet do you? There lies the story in regards to Yesterday...

Yesterday was an interesting day on the IoT Farm.

The previous night while I was working my swing shift, my better half shared that she had found a lady giving away 5 laying hens and a coop to go with them. But it sounded like there was so much interest in it that the outcome was uncertain. So I continued my working on the Raspberry Pi B and using MotionEyeOs with the Noir Camera and 2 new USB cameras that just came in. Everything connected fine up to the point of trying to go from hardwired to the WiPi usb adapter. So this had my attention as I am continuing to try and troubleshoot since the WiPi is esssential. Side note, there is a big difference in response between the RPi 3 and the RPi B running MotionEyeOs. Patience is a must using the B.

After 6 hours of sleep I was up and running again, getting Kiddos ready for school and planning my day for working on the Farm Operations Center assembly. I have been playing with just the basic setup of the 7" touchscreen with RPi 3 attached to the back but want to come up with an actual container in case I want to move it about the Farm. So a F.O.C. Box is in the plans!

This is what greeted my wife in the morning through the newly installed sliding Duck Door. She was very Happy! Easy Egg Extraction!

Okay, 2 daughters safely at school courtesy of bus and one son delivered to his school, now time for working on the F.O.C. Box!

Walmart has all of their school supplies drastically reduced and I had noticed my kids having some various sized plastic pencil boxes that looked intriguing.

So $1.13 later I have a variety of sizes and colors to play with! Fun times await! 25 cents and 10 cents per box depending on size, very nice!

Meanwhile my wife had heard back from the lady with 5 laying hens. Yes they are available for her if we can go pick everything up. So time to unload the Truck and make sure all straps and accessories are ready to go.

It took a bit but we caught all of the hens, loaded them into a Kennel/Carrier and also loaded the Chicken coop into the back of the Truck. She even threw in another female rabbit with food for both rabbit and hens.

Due to the size of the Coop the tailgate had to stay down and everything was strapped/secured quite tightly. It seems we were an interesting sight as we picked up our son at the school. It isn't everyday someone pulls up with a Chicken Coop in the back of their truck, complete with live Chickens. Interestingly enough our son was NOT surprised. :-) He just hopped in and started talking to the rabbit. who was in a little carrier by his seat. Doesn't every family collect farm animals like Old McDonald?

Arriving back at the IoT Farm everyone was quite interested in our new additions.

Even the G.O.A.Ts were interested in helping in their own special way.

I even got some supplies to play with, she had 10 Chicken Nipples that she gave me that I am going to use with pvc piping to run water to the animals! There you can see the F.O.C. in it's base form ready to be placed into a box.

Here are the new Ladies being introduced to the full sized Chicken Casa.

Here is the new Coop in place. A quick check of it and we want to add some sturdier latches and start some serious weather proofing. And yes, another sliding door has now been added to the to-build list. :-)

While we headed out for my son's special tutoring that evening a little rain storm rolled through. Here are the new Ladies checking everything out after the rain. By the time we managed to get all of the various animals locked down for the evening I had a couple of inches of wet clay on my running shoes. Note to self: buy some waterproof mud boots for future weather conditions.

We had been concerned that with the new move and new location the birds would all be quite upset and we may have some chaos for a bit on the IoT Farm but as you can see from the egg picture they have all managed to settle in. Those 5 Ladies provided us 4 eggs and apparently challenged the other birds since 1 of them laid our first chicken egg from our original chickens! Very cool!