Arduino Incubator Project

[inventeam]

We are high school students and want to use Arduino to manage our egg incubator.
We need 1. Servo(1 or 2) to rotate eggs 2. Temperature/Humidity sensors(2) 3. Hot water temperature sensor(2) 4. Hot water pump(1)
5. LCD 6. Buttons/keyboard 7. LED for alarms 8. LED with switch as light 9. Incubator door open too long detector
10. New born chick detector for last 2 hatching days. 11. RTC for real time and system resume purpose.

Should we have Arduino Uno, RTC, motor shield, a very big breadboard?

How can I lay out those together, and I don’t want to do piggyback shields?

How do I prepare power supply? Each board needs 9V?

Please help us to make correct order.

Gunn High InvenTeam

[adafruit_support_bill]

Assuming your pump only needs to run in one direction, I don't think you need the motor shield. If it is a DC motor you can control it with a MOSFET or a relay. If it is AC, you can use a power-switch-tail.

I would recommend something like a wing-shield to make all the connections easy. It also has a prototyping area in the middle that can be used for things like your RTC and indicator leds. The RGB LCD shield would give you your display and buttons. If you don't want to stack shields, you can leave off the headers and connect it to the Wing Shield with just 4 wires.

Not sure what would work for a newborn chick detector. You might be able to use the motion-detection feature of this camera.

Power supply requirements will depend a bit on what you are driving with it. If the pump and water heaters are being powered by this than you will need much more than for just the electronics.

[inventeam]

We only need DC power for controller, motor 6v 1 minute/4 hour, pump 6v 3 minutes/10 minutes,sensors, LCD.
The hot water is from solar water heater.
If they all run at same time, what kind power we should prepare for 24/7 for 30 days?
We will set up solar panel to charge deep cycle battery(12v).
What is the better way to connect battery with controller to provide stable performance.

thanks for quick reply.

Emily

[adafruit_support_bill]

motor 6v 1 minute/4 hour, pump 6v 3 minutes/10 minutes

Do you have any more detailed specifications for the motors & pumps? If your primary power is from a 12v solar/battery system, we need to regulate it to 6v with enough current (amps) and enough capacity (amp hours) to run to run all the motors simultaneously.
The rest of the circuitry is relatively low power and can easily be run from a 5v DC/DC converter.

[franklin97355]

The hot water is from solar water heater.

Make sure you have enough reserve to last overnight and a few days of cloudy weather, there are lives at stake here!