Introduction:

An incubator is an apparatus in which environmental conditions, such as temperature and humidity, can be controlled, and is commonly used for hatching eggs. This is a simple incubator which automatically regulates the heat inside an almost hermetically sealed system, based on sensor readings. This can be categorized as a hard real-time system.

Features:

The system can be accessed from a user friendly digital user interface based on an OOP menu. The sensor that I have used is the Grove Temperature and Humidity Sensor. The library files for the sensor are inside the folder named Grove_Temperature_And_Humidity_Sensor-master. Copy this folder and paste it into your Arduino libraries folder.

Atmega328P bootloaded with Arduino is used in this project. For more details, see the Incubator.ino file.

Inspiration:

Let me tell you a story about my inspiration behind this project. Two of my nephews are dedicated admirers of birds. On the other hand, I feel rather inhibited to come into birds' contacts. One night in their house, I was encouraged to take a Cockatiel bird and caress it. Laugh as you may, but I was scared as ever to do precisely that. But, eventually I summoned up all my courage and took it. That was it. Triumph intermingled with a sense of care and it felt really good. Coincidentally, the bird laid an egg the next day. Without its pair, it wouldn't carry out the natural incubation process. So, we looked into the available incubators in the market. But, they were expensive and out of our reach. That's when the idea of this project crossed my mind.

Testing:

After completing this project, we started testing. The egg hatched but couldn't survive due to the frequent load shedding. The humidity control needs to be improved. Be sure to check out the github page and provide your valuable contributions.