The Development of Chicken Coop Automatic Remote Visual Monitoring System

Abstract

Purpose: A remote visual monitoring system will be very helpful for chicken farmers to monitor their cages, that usually located away from their houses. This system needs adequate bandwidth in transmitting the video over the internet, which is usually very limited in urban areas. The main goal of this research is to develop an automatic chicken coop remote monitoring system and define the optimum video resolution to be transmitted. Methods: We used an 8 MP Raspberry Pi camera V2 to record the video and send the results to Google Drive by utilizing the GDrive API. Furthermore, a live streaming video from the chicken coop is accessible through a simple HTTP web page utilizing ngrok as a tunneling software so that the live streaming video can be publicly accessed from anywhere using a web browser. Three video resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 with 15 and 30 framerates were used in our experiments. Each scenario has a duration of five minutes and takes 12 times.Result: The experiment results showed, resolutions that provide a stable video recording and streaming are 640x480 and 800x600. The resulting system succeeded in performing live streaming along with the process of data acquisition. Value: The Google Drive infrastructure is used because of its popularity and convenience by people with limited digital literacy such as smallholder chicken farmers. Furthermore, the video produced by this system can be used in supporting research of chicken behavior pattern identification to build a system notification of an emergency situation in the cage.