The Techno Chicken Coop

     So, as part of my IT class, I have to do an independent project.  So, I have decided to set up a chicken coop monitoring station.  Weather, that is.

     The whole concept behind this, and the driving force is, the Raspberry Pi.  It's a small computer (the foot print is credit card sized.) that really lends itself to prototyping electronics.   That is to say, you can hook up sensors to it for nearly anything.  I'll be hooking up 2 temperature sensors (one inside and one outside), Barometric pressure (outside), humidity (inside), luminosity (inside), and a camera for the viewing of the chickens.  All of this will be accessible online so the students at my daughter's school can access the weather data and view the chickens.  Living close to the Washington State Fair, they have a farm block every year in the curriculum. 

Raspberry Pi

Model B:  700 MHz processor, can be overclocked to 1GHz, 512 MB RAM

Pi Crust

The Pi Crust is placed on the GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) pins to ease use of the interface.  I will also be using a breadboard to expand the GPIO even further as shown directly under here.

RPi with Pi Crust, ribbon cable, and breadboard

This is the Raspberry Pi with the Pi Crust mounted on top.  It also has the ribbon cable attached to the GPIO and leading to the Pi Cobbler (To interface with the breadboard).

Tomorrow, I'll be starting in with the Operating System and working on getting Python going on the Pi.  (Python is the programing language I'll be using to interface the sensors to the RPi.)