I've kept chickens for ~7 years as of this writing and employed automation for the majority of those years. Chickens are great fun and one of the easiest animals to farm; the addition of automation eliminates some of the more mundane chores. I subscribe to a pasturing approach where chickens are given unrestricted access to my surrounding woodlands, meadows, and wetlands - there are a number of benefits to this system of management that I won't dive into here. Aside from fire mitigation, the property remains in a fairly wild and unaltered state and all active management centers around the coop - this is in contrast to other systems where birds are confined to cages, coops, and optionally attached runs in accordance with metrics on minimum cubic feet per bird. Motivation Over the last few months I've been mulling over a new design for my chicken coop automation system. It's been nearly 2 years since the last refresh and few new dynamics are in play for the 4th version:
With the COVID-19 lockdowns in effect we're tapping our frozen reserves of past harvests and prepared foods more frequently. The microwave has certainly seen an uptick in meal prep. Unfortunately one of the turntable wheels on our GE Profile dislocated and became damaged beyond use which prevents rotation while cooking - game over for achieving reasonable cooking performance. Lengthy shipping delays and complete shutdown of business is the norm at the moment so I decided to 3D print a replacement. With such a simplistic part, reverse engineering one of the working wheels took only a few minutes as did whipping up a model in SolidWorks. Print took ~15 minutes then snapped on and rotated like an OEM part. For those in a similar situation, I'm releasing the STL file for fabrication on your own 3D printer - hopefully there's someone out there who's life got a tad easier during these crazy times. https://github.com/TKBrown/GE-Profile-Turntable-Wheel UPDATE: Over time th