The Arduino Chicken Incubator

A Little story.

Back in 1995 while in high school, I did the most famous science project of my life. I built a chicken incubator out of a cardboard box with a pane of glass to see, a light and a thermometer. It is by today's standards a bare bones incubator and I didn't succeed in hatching anything but it has never been succeeded.

Flash forward to 2013 after getting a Masters in Computer Science and Information Systems about 3 years after discovering Arduino. I thought about that old project I did and after years of wanting to duplicate it again. I decided to do it. However unlike 1995, I wanted to apply what I learned about using an arduino to the new chicken incubator. It is going to be a self-regulating life support system that will cool down automatically when the temperature gets too hot.

Luckily I found this box in an alley in the summer of 2013 and after a long wait, I painted it red and put a light inside it. I won't tell you how to make your own containment. You can decide what containment you want.

Here's where I install the heart of the device, the Lightbulb, recommend a standard 60 watt bulb

Chicken eggs need a temperature between 23C and 25c (99F to 101F) and humidity of 90% to properly incubate. I used an arduino to control the incubator's self regulation. A DHT22 sensor detects temperature/humidity and sends it to the arduino to display it on the LCD.

The fan is ripped from an old power supply and used to blow out hot air. It's connected to a 12v source switched by a relay on D7 on the arduino.

A list of the part I've used

Arduino UNO
Breadboard or any circuit rail
DHT22 Sensor
A fan( preferably a PC fan, If you want to use a heavy duty fan, you can do so. I just don't know the best way to split 120v 2 amps through the relay)

I've included the schematics