OK, I'll gladly pass on my idea for a thousand dollars.

Just weigh the whole chicken house with x number of birds in it,
subtract the weight of chicken house and divide by x.

I guess the chicken house probably consists of cages of x birds in
each cage (eg 500, 1000 or 5000?). Put load cells under the
supports of the cage, add all the weights to get the total.
Alternatively, if it suits better, suspend the cage from cables and
use load cells to measure the strain in the cables. (Bird on a wire
technique). Ask all the birds to step outside for a minute while you
weigh the cage by itself. Ensure that all feeding mechanisms,
water troughs etc are separately mounted and not measured by the
system.

The "little human effort" bit comes in when you quickly check that
no birds are airborne before pressing a button that takes a weight
reading. Then the same little human does the afore mentioned
subtract and divide routines on a small calculator to get the final
answer of average weight per bird.

But wait there's more! For my $2000 idea you do all of the above,
with lots PICs everywhere of course, plus network all the load cells
back to a PC. The PC has some real fancy software on it that logs
all the weight data at regular time intervals, correlates it with
feeding times and food volume, water supply, chicken house
temperature, humidity, CO2 content, ambient noise, light intensity,
wind direction and velocity. All this makes big reports that look
great to the management and shareholders and tell you what
makes the birds heavy the quickest.

I better stop rolling out the good ideas in case you are getting low
on money.

Brent

>ok a thousand dollars to anyone who provides a solution which I
use,
> poultry industry, very cost driven, every cent counts as the proffit margin
> on a bird is in the fractions of a cent per pound.
>
> problem:
>  finding the average weight of about 10,000 birds in a chicken house a day
> before market, old solution wiegh out a hundred or so by hand... average the
> numbers.
> this is to make sure they are at optimum wieght to goto market to provide
> maximum proffit.
>
> how do you do it electronicly with little human effort?
> at first we tried an electronic scale placed on the floor, hoping that
> enough chickens would step on it... problem is chickens are
> territorial...... pretty much only one or two chickens step on it...
>
> and it has to be relitivly simple...i.e. no large robotic vacume cleaner
> robots that rove around and suck up chickens, weigh them, and spit them out
> :-)
>
> any ideas?
> oh and my fathers company is www.Mountaire.com  for anyone interested.
>
> Ryan
>