The goal of this project is to design and build a cheap, simple, and automatic incubator for
family farms. Simple incubators, while cheap, are dicult to manage because the tempera-
ture and humidity must be constantly tweaked by the user. Automatic egg incubators, while
requiring almost no user input, are very expensive ( $700). This incubator is around $100,
has automatic temperature control, egg turning, and status update tweets. Temperature
control is achieved through an Arduino nano, which uses gains determined by the Ziegler-
Nichols tuning method to turn on a solid state relay connected to a heat lamp. Egg-turning
is achieved through a novel "shifting
oor" design, featuring a slot mechanism attached to
servo motors to shift the
oor beneath the eggs. Egg-turning stops automatically at 18 days
for hatch "lockdown". An ethernet shield is used to tweet status updates and warn the user if
a problem occurs. Through logging data, we found that the incubator has good temperature
control, egg-turning capabilities, and informative tweets.