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We're renovating our chickenhouse and moving stuff around, so the `cam is off-line for a little while. We might take advantage of the break to convert the `cam machine from a Windows machine to a linux system, in hopes that it'll stay up for longer than 48 hours at a time without us needing to manually restart it...  Here's an old view of the coop How the ChickenCam works (when it works) |
Excellent Chickens !Its winter in New England and the chickens are doing fine. We have
a hoop-style greenhouse that we move them into for the cold season.
They actually contribute substantially to keeping the greenhouse warm
and it gives us a chance to watch them closely and make sure they're
all in good shape before they go out again in the spring. |
What kinds ?
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Where'd They Come From ?The Leghorns and Rhodies came from Marti Poultry Farm and we're very happy with them. They're vigorous, handsome, good layers, and fun to play with ! The Mille Fleur bantam came from a neighbor. She's a little cutie ! The funny-lookin' chickens came from McMurray Hatchery. Since we bought them more for fun than anything else, we aren't disappointed that they're only mediocre layers. We especially enjoy observing their "flock" behaviors: each rooster has his particular clutch of favorite hens that he protects and escorts around the farm. |
These are our observations about different types:
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Chicken People !
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Technical Chicken Stuff
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It should be noted that the stock software is not yet..."robust":
ours crashes annoyingly often, *sigh*.....
farm.net is a Linux box at Chair Hill Farm in South Hampton, NH. We have a
56K leased line to the internet, and an ethernet running through the house.
There are 10BaseT lines running out to the greenhouse, which is right next
to the chicken coop. In the greenhouse is a 386/33 running (ugh!) windows.
It has a QuickCam attached, fed through the wall to the chicken
coop. Connectix QuickPict 1.1 and later has an autocapture mode that snaps
pictures at specified intervals (20 seconds in this case), and writes them
to disk - in this case an NFS mounted directory on farm.net. A daemon on
farm.net picks up the pictures when a complete image is written (it takes
3-4 seconds for a machine this slow to write the jpeg) and copies it
to where the web server can get to it.
The Connectix QuickCam, which makes this all possible (or at least cheap), is a good toy. It sells for around $100 and attaches to a PC's parallel port. There's a Mac version as well. I'm not associated with Connectix in any way, but if they felt like sending me a beta of the color version in exchange for the plug I wouldn't mind.