There are prominent needs for egg incubators around the globe, because of many factors.
A person fascinated by birds likes to raise ornamental birds but he couldn’t find or get a
broody bird as such, non vegetarians eat birds where in most cases they are imposed to
take birds that are raised through artificial injections, in many cases even if we have an
egg in hand we can’t hatch the egg naturally since it is difficult to find the bird and get it
hatched etc. All these matters expose the importance of this project called Automatic Egg
Incubator.
The project that is being portrayed here implements an Automatic Egg Incubator using
ATMEL AVR ATMEGA32. The main four parameters in any bird hatching would be
incubation temperature, relative humidity inside the incubator, ventilation and egg
turning. Hatching temperature, optimum relative humidity, number days for hatch etc
depends on the bird species. The incubation area is an enclosed chamber with various
mechanisms and controls. There is a carrier which holds the eggs inside the chamber for
an easy rotation of eggs.
Above mentioned four vectors have its own importance that failure in any one of them
can cause lose of entire hatch. Temperature of the incubation decides quality of the batch.
Both low and high temperatures lead to decreased hatchability and produce weak chicks.
So keeping incubation temperature at optimum value is a must. Mixing ensures
uniformity of temperature and humidity inside the chamber to prevent localization of any
factors. Aeration takes in fresh oxygen and removes carbon dioxide gas evolved out of
egg shells out. Egg turning ensures entire mixing of albumen to provide sufficient
nutrients. Looking holistically, all of the above factors matters a lot and an over all
stability has to be attained by adjusting all of them. AVR ATMEGA32 maintains this
equilibrium perfectly by using the features and peripherals available on it.
The design files and relevant documents explains how the entire system is setup and
ATMEGA32 manage those four vectors. Two digital thermometer chips DS1631 acts as
dry and wet electronic thermometers, DS1307 acts as the time keeping RTC for the entire
system and the LCD provided shows live status of the incubator. Both digital
thermometer chips and RTC utilize the TWI available on the ATMEGA32
microcontroller.
Temperature control of the chamber is met through a motorized kerosene wick lamp.
Depending on the wet temperature reading, AVR controls exposure of the wick to keep