Automating our Egg Mobile

Welcome back to another video, folks. It's minus 20 degrees. My hands are sticking to metal. On a day like this, perfect time to get in the Eggmobile and start getting ready for automation. So first things first, before we get to automating, there's a bunch of little jobs to do. All the Eggmobiles are slight and so I want to tell you step by step on each of them as we go into the automation process. It's getting dark now, so limited what we can do today. This Eggmobile has got the side hatch that opens vertically and that's facilitating using an actuator to open and close it. Much easier than a door that swings all the way out. So I'm actually going to change the other doors on the Eggmobiles to match, like this one, and just made of wood slats and that creates a predator proof doorway and it's just held up by a couple of pieces of twine that works fine. Now I've just cut off the back steps because something that happened with these is old caravan supports, but they were getting stuck in the ground if you're going over sort of bumpy terrain. And we never actually used them in the old days, we used to put down supports at the back. What I want to do now is get one vertical quick release trailer support that's mounted on the back and that stops the whole thing tipping when you step into the Eggmobile. Now, obviously you can weight the trailer as well as you like to, but the weight of the hens in different places will obviously upset the balance. So a couple of things to tell you about. One, I invested in 12amp hour batteries for my Bosch Blue. Now, everyone's got their own opinions, but we love Bosch Professional range. These are all the power tools we use on the farm. They're not the cheapest, but they're certainly the best. Better than any of the other brands in my opinion. And we've got some upgraded batteries for better life. People ask me what sort of gear I'm using for a head torch LED lenser. This is an older model, but these are supplied to the sas. Best head torches out there. If you live in a dark country with where it's dark for 12 months of the year, get a good head torch. That's my advice. So what am I doing? Well, I'm going to patch up those few dents. I'm going to just make everything tidy as it should be and I'm going to retrofit these nest boxes. So I've taken one out here and I'm going To actually extend the nest boxes by about 20 centimeters. These egg boxes are perfect for two collections a day. But if you wanted to do one collection a day, then you need more space to collect the eggs. So what I'm going to do is stick 20cm extra on and then I'll have to build these flaps again and make them longer. But what I'm going to do is make the 20cm addition with chicken mesh so that if any cracked eggs roll in, they will drip down onto the COVID below. They'll get eaten by the hens pecking at it. And it should help keep the nests a lot cleaner. So I'm going to make nine new boards. I'm using the existing boards that are in there. I'm just going to extend these woods out and add chicken wire underneath and put new flaps on. I need to put a new poo sheet on. This is what collects the manure so it doesn't land on the boxes or on you when you're collecting eggs. And that's about it for this one. Just a bit of tidying up around the door to do. Check the wheels are all good. Now, like our other eggmobiles, we've built double wheels in this direction. It's much better to do this just drilling through the actual frames and using spacers and strong bolts to hold these together. And then we put on some extensions on the inflators so that you can reach them easily, which helps a lot. So that's about it for this one when I got it tidied up. Now I can put the battery in solar panel, all the wiring for the lights and the nest box controllers and the door opening and closing. And I'll show you how that works. You chose the cat flea. Cat fleas aren't just for cats. They live on and bite dogs too. Cat fleas are thin and flat, so they can move easily through fur. Nest belt for Bruno's developments. So he's busy making the prototypes that we'll be testing that we're funding for, hopefully being able to supply people with low cost rollaway double sided nest boxes. And he ordered this that got shipped straight here. There's about 50 kilos of Nest mat there. Super fun. So here's what I've done. I've just taken the old board that's from the nest mat and I've just replaced these with longer wood and taller wood at the front. Then I just used roof screws to attach this mesh with staples on this side. And then I just staple in a bit of foam. So when the nest mats are in. Eggs are hitting foam. Clean it up. Good to go. This makes work never the same again. So this morning I've been on a crazy mission. I wanted to shift the nest box up slightly to allow room for a control box and a battery here. These nest boxes are extremely heavy. The way I manage to do that on my own is with a little bit of trickery. Just using a car jack and a wheel screwed on the top of this bit of wood and I shimmied it along this metal plate. I've got as far as I wanted so we can release that and we're good to go. That I've left the metal stuck in there but that's now got nests sitting back where I wanted. That was intense to do that. Now the reason I've moved them forward is to put the box and battery there. But also I wanted to re engineer the space so that the nest boxes can make use of the automatic leveling. So that's what we've got going on now. I'll finish the nest box. So we've got an extra 20cm on here. An extra 10cm on here. These are the same lengths as before. That should do it. It's time to start with the automations. Another cool tool I've got that I got for the farm like a hero tour for when I was traveling around Europe to be able to charge drones and computers is this yeti. And it's a power bank basically. It can run up to 1500 watts comfortably and 3000 watts on a surge. Power tools out in the middle of nowhere. Pretty handy bit of kit. Solar powered. Or you can charge it up off the mains. Can run USBs or cigarette sockets or different plugs etc. So we're taking this feeder to the sheep. Stop them wasting so much food. It's a little bit worse for wet. So this feed is held together by rope at this point. It's had a bit of abuse over the years but it will stop the sheep from wasting their bales. This is where having the tractor really comes into its own. Like just getting the eggmobile out the field to start working on it. Even with a thousand kilo lifting capacity on the forks the eggmobile was so frozen into the ground that I couldn't even lift it out. I had to just bump it and get a sledgehammer on the little jockey wheel at the front of the one that I pulled out. But just being able to move things easily is just such a useful way to be. I guess that's why People have tractors, isn't it? Hey sheep. This is a hundred amp hour battery. Good for solar and wind. And what else have we got? We've got some linear actuators, different lengths. One big one for opening the trapdoor. Shorter ones for leveling the nest box and another one for opening and closing the nests. Face masks so we don't get Covid or bird flu or anything like that. We've got Kato's lovely. Look at that lovely control box all labeled up. All the wirings labeled up. Beautiful. So that will get installed up here by the battery. That's why I wanted to move the nest partly if you want one of these or you want to know how to build one of these. Kettle's got a hundred euro online training so you can learn for yourself. Or he'll make you one if you pay him to do that. We got some lovely wire. We've got some LED lights, we've got cable clips. We've got this lovely old tool for taking off the. Look at the mechanism on that for taking off wire ends. Beautiful old tool. We've got some battery terminals, some cable ties. Got a new poo sheet to go on that stops the poo landing on you or on the nest boxes. Time to get to work. Now this whole system is going to be powered by 100 watt solar panel. Now I haven't thought of the best way to do that. I know Cattle puts his on the sloping side of the Eggmobile with an adjustable arm. However, when we're going the opposite way down our field lanes which mostly run east to west, that's going to be an issue. We're not going to get any sun. So I'm thinking I'll either have something on a swiveling mount that can go round at the front or back or some ingenious thing that can flip over to both sides. Haven't decided yet but maybe I'll leave that until the spring when it's a bit warmer. I'll just get this in and start testing it, see how we think it works. So I got this mounted at the right height for easeful operation. Got the battery down there. Standard black and red. Red for live. Well, I've only got blue and black. If you want your chickens to be insured, make sure you use a certified electrician, not my budget and scarper firm. We'll get that connected up and then first thing to try. Well, maybe lights would be a good idea but I think it'd be more fun to see something moving. So maybe we'll do a Trapdoor First, I've gone for a 50 millimeter linear actuator. Got some nice polypropylene rope. And I got me a lovely pulley. That'll help. Then the actuators come with these pins and clips to attach them to whatever you're attaching them to. So we'll get on that just temporarily. Wiring. I've got these two separate wires rather than the dual core wire, which is a bit of a pain. But I run it along the top of the roost there. Got the door hooked up. And so just to manually override this, we have to press this thing and then we can set the door lowering. Oh, hello. Let's jump in, have a look. The whirring sound of the automated eggmobile. So that's the 50 mil actuator. It's nice and slow. Let's go and have a look on the outside. We like it. Chickens will be on a little hustle to get out first. Now, by having 50 mil, it allows you to have a bit of a slope. And you'll see the line will go slack now, but if we were on sloping land, it would give it enough room to go all the way down to the ground. Fun, fun, fun. All right, We've got a 15 centimeter actuator here to see if we can rig that up to the nest boxes. First test seems to be working. Bit creaky. Might need to grease the hinges here. There we go. Let's open. We'll just let that finish its cycle. We'll test it back the other way, see how it does with closing. It would be better to have a pulley so it's pulling it a bit more of an arc, maybe because it's putting pressure on that beam, but it doesn't seem so bad. I think it's 90 kilos lifting on these. Very nice. Very nice indeed. Some people ask why I haven't put the nests on the outside. Now, that was a design choice because of our narrow field gates and not wanting to have anything protruding on the side that will get stuck on a gate post or anything like that. But I actually like having the nest boxes inside. Some people find it a little uncomfy because you need to be crouching down. But I'm so comfy crouching like this. And this is how I collect the eggs. It's how I sit and work a lot of the time. Something I picked up in Southeast Asia. But the thing is, the eggs are very protected in here. I believe they probably stay cooler than if they were on a metal sheeted Nest box on the outside where the sun is going to hit them more. Here they've got a big airflow going through and they're inside a wooden box, inside a drafty space that they stay fine. It's never getting too hot in there for the eggs. But also I just feel like you'd need to build the egg mobile from scratch if you wanted them on the outside. Not a bad idea. Loads of people do it. But bear in mind, if it's raining, one thing that's nice in here is you can collect the eggs, they're all dry. You can put a little cover over your egg collection crates, take them out to the quad to bring them back to the farm. If you were doing it outside, you would need somewhere to put your crates because you can't be putting them down in chicken shit in the long grass. So you'd need a whole bench system to on. And there's other logistics. There's more places for air and rain to get in, etc. So I actually like having them inside. I've got no issue with it myself, so I've decided, yeah, not going to change that. So this top nest box has a beam that goes along here to shut them out a bit. You see, there's a lower entry point in these nest boxes, so there should be a plank of wood that goes across the three. We've got the door coming in, nest box opening up. Pretty fun playing around with eggmobiles now. I'm just getting it installed. I'm not putting the solar panel in, as I said, and I'll tidy it all up. I asked Cuddle if he'd had any problem with chickens pecking on the wires. He said, nah, he hasn't seen anything like that. So I think that's all groovy. So I'll just be tinkering around with it a bit and playing. Very nice. Very nice indeed. We're going to adapt the next eggmobile to take in Bruno's double sided nest boxes suspended from the roof. So we'll be taking the old style nest box out and I'll have a go automating all that too. But that'll be in another video later down the line. Hopefully when it's warmer and my fingers aren't white and purple, this will automatically be opening and closing on a daily basis and we're moving our eggmobiles every second day. What that means is you can just clip this closed sometime in the day and then when it opens in the morning, it won't let the birds out and that's going to be on alternate days to facilitate us moving the birds. I'll put some nicer string on there, just tidy that up. We've just been using a bit of old blue string to hatch the door, but that is a very nice setup that will enable us to basically not have to get up so early, not go to bed too late. Very nice. Okay, following that same wire pattern, I've just put in some LED lights. Two little sets there. They should be working on the switch. Oh, yeah, sweet. All right, so we've got lights, door opening and closing, nests opening and closing. Only thing to do now is nest box leveling so we can push these forwards and backwards to account for undulating ground. Then we need a bit of a cover for here. We'll leave the solar panel till the spring, but it'd be nice to have this set up in a way that doesn't get chicken shit on it and keep everything organized and tidy. Last bit, nest box leveling. Now then, the nest closing sits nicely between the gap between these two and is secured to this beam that holds the boxes together so the whole nest box can move backwards and forwards independently. Now, we've always had it on come alongs with a chain as a backup system in case the come along didn't work and that they won't fall forward on people because they're very, very heavy. I think I'll leave the chain in place and then we'll get an actuator and we'll bolt it through the roof here. Well, put two on working in tandem somewhere around here that we can just pull the whole structure up and down. And then this nest box gets. We put chicken wire or you can have boards or something to stop birds going behind there. And you remember some years ago we started doing that because we had a time when someone forgot to open nest boxes and 50 birds piled up behind there and squash themselves to death. So you don't want birds getting behind the boxes, but you need a bit of space behind if you want the nest box to be able to self level. So we'll have a little spirit level here and then on the switch here you can just go forwards or backwards and tilt them out depending on undulating ground. Now in reality, over the years, we've actually just never actually moved the nest boxes really. We just tend to park the egg mobile, the flat spot you can find. But it's a nice feature because it allows you very quickly to set it all up optimally for the rollaways. Now we don't have A lot of ground clearance at the front, but we're going to be tilting at the top. It's accessed here on this beam that supports the nest box. And we're only going to be moving a few centimeters, so I think that's going to work a treat. Okay, got these in place. Now what I'm going to do is wire them up and let them out about halfway and then bolt these through the nest box roofs. And that way we got a bit of forward and backwards play. I can't put them in right now, obviously, so it's got nowhere to go backwards. So we'll wire them up, see how they work. So, apologies for not having a camera set up to show you sort of time lapse of doing the job. It's so cold out here, it's not great for batteries and it's a bit dark in here, to be honest. The phone is actually picking up the light really well, but the camera's quite grainy when I show in here, but you get the picture anyway. And, well, speaking of batteries, loving these new big batteries for the Bosch. This has been running for days and days for drilling through metal, wood, screwing, bolts, everything, and it's. Yeah, game changer. Love it. It's quite heavy, though. Got to have a strong arm. Beautiful. Very nice. Let's close up the nests. There's a bit of an ongoing joke to send someone to the workshop for a spirit level bubble. Funny thing is, we actually have one. So using a little spirit level bubble and a little toggle switch here, you can easily put them into position. Beauty. That's a go. All right, we'll tidy that up another time. Right, Just go get the hens to pack their own eggs and then we'll be set. So that's not all the functionality. There's another cable that can be used for an energizer. So you could easily have a very powerful energizer in the eggmobile and send out crocodile clips to the fence. Now we're staying with our portable solar energizers. I like them as a visual check when you're leaving to make sure the power is on. That's our primary predator defense. So I like to use the system that we have in place. Pretty cool. Now, so it didn't take so long to put together. I've got to tidy up some of the wiring, build a box to cover the front of this and put back the guards around the nest, put on the poo sheep and basically get this ready for the spring. But that's about €400 of gear to do this. And think of all the benefits. So we've got opening in the morning to let the birds out. So there's never a panic with the changing time of daylight that the birds don't get out in time. The nests can be opened and closed at any time. It's all programmable on here. And then a big benefit is closing at nighttime and automatic lights. So that's been a big thing, is having lights come on in the evening to help the birds go back in. If you do that from day one, the birds will automatically go in and roost on their own. So not having to go up at 11:30 at night here in Sweden to turn the lights off and close the eggmobile is a real bonus. Now, on the day that we're moving one of the eggmobiles, we'll obviously have to catch the door and then we'll go up and move the eggmobile that's moving that day and the other one will have the nests open, the doors open and we just go and turn up feed and ch. Okay, so it'll save a few minutes. But the big saving for us is going to be those nighttime visits. So we're going to basically be able to only go up to the eggmobile once to move and feed in the morning. And then with the extended nests and the new nests that I'll show you in another video when we fit them into a different eggmobile, we should only do one egg collection. So it takes down the amount of daily services of the egg mobile to two. And that's going to save a bunch of time and be a lot more flexible. It means that we can go to the lake, have a barbecue. You know, you don't need to worry about the eggs. The nest boxes will be closed and you can just turn up and collect the eggs anytime you like. So it's going to bring a great degree of flexibility. For €400, I'd say that's a really great deal. And Catal's got on his website €100 online training, shows you where to get all the parts, how to wire it up, how to do it smart. And I think that's a really generous offer. And this is all thanks to Catal. So thank you so much, Catal, for your control boxes. I'll do them justice by making sure they're all chicken proof and nice in there. Now, Heather Hill farm has a YouTube channel and I think it's a lot of great information on there. Catal showing you all around his pastured poultry. Silver pasture market garden and other things with herbivores and sales. And I think it's a really great channel. So head on over there. I'll put it in the links below. And this is really, you know, credit where credit is due. This is Cattle's innovations. I've thought about automating in the past, but he really put this together and tested it and refined it and has made an incredible system. I think you can see if I can do this. You can do it too, and it seems great. It's going to take a bit of testing just to make sure everything's right. One concern I'd have is the pulley. When the rope is slack, it maybe can choke out on the pulley. So maybe I'll put a tube or a better pulley in there. And then I want to see how these work over time because I think there's things, you know, little kinks that might need ironing up. But very happy with this. It's a very easy build and it's really thanks to Cattle and Heatherhill Farm. So show him some love. Go and support his YouTube channel. Go and subscribe over there. I'll leave it there for now. I think you get the general picture and I look forward to updating you as I tidy things up and get it ready in future videos. Don't forget, you can buy our book in the links below as well as online trainings, free and paid online trainings. Lots of information down there. We'll see you in a video soon, folks. Bye for now.