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ABSTRACT
Due to inability to combine different job with poultry business, there is urgent needs for a machine that can take care of poultry birds in Nigeria. Advanced countries e.g USA, Germany and Canada employs automation into the feeding operation of an animal in their farms. Adopting the same idea in our agricultural business will be an advantage and will create another benefit in the bid of solving developmental problems within the country. Locally sourced material was selected according to desired purposes and to the design criteria and an engineer friendly microcontroller (Arduino) was chosen to solve the embedded engineering system design using C++ code. The embedded system comprised of the microcontroller , actuators and serial peripheral interface (SPI) and were programmed to trigger at the set time and drive the carriage to discharge the feed. A three times daily feeding automated poultry feeding machine with a reliable energy storage backup system, embedded system and leadscrew drive mechanism was designed constructed and tested in this work. The machine was made up of a carriage which holds the feed and is driven by a coupling mechanism consisting of a leadscrew with a nut mating. A stepper motor was used as the drive while nut mating. The control architecture was programmed with a microcontroller. To be self-sufficient in energy, the machine also incorporate a solar system made up of solar panel, charge controller and a battery. The test indicated that the machine can feed poultry birds thrice daily. It worked perfectly well any time it was tested. It could work for six days with a full battery charge while the battery can be fully charged in three days.
