Chicken-n-Veg

Posts Tagged ‘electric fence’

I have recently been working on a DIY gadget to allow remote monitoring of the status of the leisure battery which powers our electric chicken fence. Usually the first warning that the battery is getting flat is a red warning light on the fence energiser. By the time we see this it is normally too late and the fence is not being powered at an effective voltage. This is not an ideal situation, with foxes visiting our garden most nights. The idea of the remote monitor is that it will always give an accurate reading of the battery voltage, that can conveniently be checked from inside the house and can sound an alarm if it drops below a predefined threshold. It will also give an indication if the electric fence is actually switched on. There is a switch for the fence that we use to power it down when entering the run to collect eggs, etc. Unfortunately it is all too easy to forget to turn the fence back on when finished. Without going back outside it is often not possible to see if the fence is on or off. The energiser does have a light that flashes green when the the fence is powered, but this is not really visible during the day. As an additional feature the outside temperature is also monitored. To be honest a large part of doing the design was as a challenge to do something different and interesting during the winter evenings. But I do still think it will be a very useful tool to have.

I have now produced a fully working prototype. It consists of two units. A transmitter unit that sits near the bottom of the garden, connected to the battery, monitoring and regularly transmitting its readings. A second unit in the  house receives the data from the transmitter and displays the status on a small 16×2 LCD display. Both modules are based around an Arduino Duemilanove microprocessor board. The Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. There are plenty of free resources available that make the Arduino platform an easy introduction to microprocessor development. The Duemilanove is the latest revision of the basic Arduino USB board. It connects to a computer with a standard USB cable and contains everything else to program and use the board. For the wireless link I used low cost 433MHz AM Transmitter and Receiver modules. With a couple of home made antennas the indoor receiver unit can reliably receive data from the outdoor transmitter when separated by more than 40m (and a window).

To finish off the design and get it into daily use I just have to box the two modules (including a weatherproof box for the outside unit). I also need to ruggedize the antennas and have a couple of minor hardware and software tweaks that I would like to implement. In the spirit of the open source Arduino platform that the  design is based around, I am happy to share my design. If anyone is interested drop me an email (on the Contact Us page) and  I will write up the project and provide a link on this site to any support files I have. I am sure that the general design could be used for numerous general purpose remote monitoring or control applications. With small software changes, for instance, the receiver could support multiple transmitter modules.

We have been able to let the chickens have full access to the garden for quite a few days this month, whenever someone has been keeping an eye on them. On the days that we’ve not been able to let them out, however, it has become clear that the space in the run is not enough. Theoretically it is big enough, but we want really happy chickens and don’t want any squabbling due to the limited space.

There are two good reasons why we didn’t feel able to let them out when we weren’t about:

• They seem to have developed a taste for most things growing in our vegetable beds
• We see a fox in the garden most evenings (and even sometimes during the day)

We therefore ordered a Hotline electric poultry net and a high capacity 12V leisure battery. This arrived late last week and we erected it this weekend. It’s a 50m poultry net, giving a very generous run of approximately 12m x 12m  (40ft x 40ft). The net was placed around as many points of interest as possible – Yucca plants, Pampas grass, trees, tree stumps. grass and bare earth for dust baths (although it will probably all be bare earth soon). The hens seem extremely happy with their new surroundings – sunbathing, having dust baths, destroying the plants. We can now let them out all day Knowing that they are safe from Mr Fox and that our vegetables are safe from them.