Chicks Love This DIY Incubator
Simon Sörensen wanted to raise chickens. To do that, he first needed to create chickens.
Raising chickens is an increasingly popular endeavor outside of the traditional farms, with many people even choosing to take on the responsibility in suburban and urban areas. But that isn’t an easy thing to do, as chickens require quite a bit of stuff to live healthy and productive lives. Most people are aware of chicken coops, but before you even get to that point, you’ll need a way to create the chicks in the first place and an incubator is the machine for the job. Those tend to be pricey, so Simon Sörensen of RCLifeOn designed and built a DIY incubator for his chicken eggs.
In order to hatch healthy chicks, the incubator needs to maintain pretty specific conditions as the eggs develop. If those eggs aren’t sitting underneath a chicken the entire time, the incubator needs to provide proper warmth, humidity, and physical movement for about three weeks. That means it needs to be reliable, which means simple.
In fact, it really just resembles a basic wood box. Sörensen constructed it from plywood and 3D-printed all of the specialty parts. There are Plexiglass windows for observation, too.
Sörensen also kept the electronics as simple as possible. You might expect that he used something like an Arduino, but that would require custom code that could have bugs. Instead, there are separate and dedicated off-the-shelf control modules for each task.
The first is for heating. That system consists of a 3D printer heated bed with a standalone digital thermostat module. Its sole purpose is to flip a relay that controls power to the bed, turning on when it gets too cold and turning off when it gets too hot.
The second is for humidity control. That system has an ultrasonic mister that sprays fine water droplets into the air when the humidity is too low. If the humidity gets too high, the controller turns on a fan to blow air out of the incubator.
The third and final is an egg roller. A speed controller with a timer function rotates a standard DC motor attached to a 3D-printed mechanism that pushes a tray back and forth. The movement of that tray rolls the eggs.
That proved to be a winning formula, because a respectable percentage of the eggs ended up transforming into baby chickens.