Development of Automatic Chicken Feeder using
Arduino Uno
Zainal H. C. Soh1, Mohd H. Ismail1, Firzana H.
Otthaman1, Muhamad K. Safie1, Muhamad A. A.
Zukri1
Faculty of Electrical Engineering1
Universiti Teknologi MARA
Penang, Malaysia
zainal872@ppinang.uitm.edu.my
Abstract—Nowadays, chicken poultry industry is an important
industry for sustainable food supply in our country. Several
innovation and invention have been developed to improve the
healthiness of chicken in coop that lead to possibly high
production of chicken meat and eggs. Consequently, the
development of an automatic chicken feeding machine can be
very useful to the growth of the poultry industry. This machine
can replace the worker for feeding the chicken thus overcome the
labour problems in the industry and introduce a semi-automatic
process in the poultry industry. The feeding machine for chicken
is using an Arduino Uno board as its main controller. In this
machine, it has two main parts, first, an Arduino to control
servomotor from storage to food container, and the second part is
an Arduino to control the temperature sensor for the freshness of
the chicken food. This helps to improve the environment in the
coop while reducing labor cost, saving food and chicken feeding
on time, control the temperature sensor for the freshness of the
chicken food and avoid contaminated food from chicken faeces
and insects.
Keywords – automatic feeding machine, chicken, chicken food,
poultry industry.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, farming and breeding are crucial and important
sector in agriculture industry. The number of Small and
Medium Enterprises (SME) involvement in poultry industry
has increases due to high demand in this healthy white meat
food. Moreover, governments also encourage people to
involve in SMEs as an alternative to increase their income and
at same time improving their economy status. The suitable
size of chicken coop is important to ensure a profitable
encounter by SMEs that involve in the industry. The large-
scale size of the chicken coop is needed to cater for more
number of chicken livestock. Commercially, usually people
allocate more than 5000 chickens in some big coops. This will
require a lot of manpower to manually feed this number of
chicken regularly and on time. Prior to modern technology and
ICT era, people were used to the conventional method to feed
chickens which is by filling containers with grains and food
manually or mechanically[1]. The main problem by using this
method is to ensure continuous the food supply, be alert and
conscious on the food balance in coop, all manually by
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Syahrul A. C. Abdullah2
Faculty of Electrical Engineering2
Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia
Shah Alam, Malaysia
bekabox181343@salam.uitm.edu.my
themselves. Furthermore, the sufficient amount of the food
provided also cannot be determined accurately to avoids
wasting food. Lastly, breeders also find that it is difficult to
manage their other daily business effectively because they
need to be around the coop every hour to monitor the poultry.
Previously, breeder sowed the food on the ground and
cause the food being contaminated from faeces and insect. It
can cause the chicken to eat food that is not nutritious and
susceptible to germs and bacteria that possibly lead to a
chicken with unhealthy comb, eye, beak, hackles, feet and
spur. Furthermore, unhealthy chicken has no appetite and
causing chicken does not get sufficient nutrients and died. The
food should be places in a container that shield the food during
non-feeding time and heated to maintained the food freshness
and kill bacteria. On the other hand, surplus food that has been
exposed to dirt and mixed with soil has caused variable losses
due to supplying chicken that are not healthy and nutritious.
Sufficient fixed amount of the grains required by chicken need
to be determine and managed properly to avoid left-over food.
Although, the solution for monitoring and control the
chicken farm operation and environmental condition
available[2][3][4][5][6][7][8], but the existing are still lacking
of an autonomous chicken feeder system. Therefore, an
automatic chicken feeder system is proposed and developed to
provide the food effectively and to control chickens feeding
time. This system provides an efficient solution for sufficient
quantity of the food distribution, fixed feeding time and hassle
free automatic feeding to help breeders. User can set desired
time and save it to microcontroller’s memory. As the
consequences, the feeder will feed the chicken automatically
and on time even when they are away from home.
This paper presents an automatic chicken feeder system
with a fixed feeding time, exact quantity of food distribution
and food container with controllable food freshness using a
microcontroller based system. The remainder of the paper is
organized as follows. Section II describes automatic chicken
feeder system development and design approach. Section III
discussed the development result of the prototyped of
automatic chicken feeder. Finally, section IV draws our
conclusions and point out the ideas for future extension of this
work.
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 II. SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT
This project involves designing and building a prototype of
an Automatic Chicken Feeder for poultry industry usage. This
means that the basic concept of the machine is to be able to
feed the chicken at a specific time set and automatically
supply predetermined amounts of food during feeding time by
using a microcontroller[[9][10][11]. Furthermore, able to
control and analyze the temperature of the grains tank to
control the freshness of grains. Lastly, this system also able to
prolong the freshness of chicken food nutrient by controlling
the surrounding temperature using a bulb of 100W where the
bulb is operated to heat up the grains. This can be achieved by
controlling the temperature inside the food tank [11].
This machine feed chicken once every 8 hours.
Furthermore, the amount of the food for each feeding can be
set by control the servo motor rotation that allow the grains go
through tank to prevent any waste. The machine could also
control the temperature inside the tank to prevent spoiled
grains and optimize the grain condition to ensure the chicken
can get better nutrient inside the grains. The project work is
aimed to offer practical, mobile yet affordable chicken feeder
machine. This section discusses on hardware, software and
system architecture.
A. Hardware Implementation
Conventionally, the chickens need a presence of
manpower to manually give the food to the chicken. This
proposed design enables an automatic chicken feeder
according time without assistant of manpower every feeding
time. Figure 1 shows the early design sketches of automatic
chicken feeding machine.
Fig. 1. Early Sketches of Automatic Feeding Machine
This project consists of seven main hardware components;
Arduino Uno board, servo motor, relay, lamp, potentiometer,
LCD and temperature sensor (LM35). The Arduino Uno board
acts as the microcontroller. The servo motor is used to open
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and closed the valve that separate the grains in the main food
storage with the feeding food container. The valve is opened
for a few second when the feeding time is ON to release
predetermined amount of grains into the food container.
LM35 has been used as a temperature sensor, which can
monitor and observed the food container temperature and send
the information to the microcontroller which can send the
current data and perform action according to that. When
temperature goes below lower threshold value then
automatically the bulb will be ON to increase the internal
temperature of food container. The lamps bulbs or LED [12]
can be use as a food heater with the threshold value of food
container temperature between 27 and 33 degrees Celsius.
Once, the temperature is higher than the upper threshold value
the bulb will automatically turn OFF by using a relay. The
food container temperature value and the feeding time is
shown on the LCD display. Figure 2 shows two main
hardware schematic diagram of the automatic chicken feeder
machine which is servo motor and temperature sensor that
were connected to the controller. These two circuits were
combined with other components to produce the product of
automatic chicken feeder.
Temperature control system
Servo motor system
Fig. 2. Hardware schematics diagram
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B. Software Implementation of new grains to be added into the food tank which is at every
Figure 3 shows the overall flow chart process of the 8 hours. The current temperature value will be show through
automatic chicken feeding machine project. The software that LCD that have been install at the feeder machine. Figure 5
will be used in this project which are Arduino programming shows the block diagram of maintaining the grain freshness
and library software. Arduino software is the main software operation in the food container.
that is used to program the system in Arduino microcontroller.
It is the open source software which easily used the C++
programming language and can download freely from the
Arduino website.

Fig. 4. Grain Load Operation Block Diagram

Fig. 5. Mantaining the Grains Freshness Operation Block Diagram

C. The developed protoyped of Automatic Chicken Feeder

Figure 6 shows the developed prototyped of Automatic

Chicken Feeder machine project.

STORAGE

SERVO

Fig. 3. Flow Chart of Project

LAMP
LCD
The goal of this project work is to feed the chicken on time
automatically where the machine is controlled by Arduino
UNO. The Arduino will activate the servo motor every 8 hours
TEMPERATURE
in 3 days since this machine will operate at the weekend only. SENSOR
It has been set up to rotate 90 degrees to open the valve for a
few seconds. Then the grains will fall to the chicken food
container. This servo motor will delay for a few second for the
grains to fall before it close back the valve. Figure 4 shown the
block diagram of grain load operation. In addition, the
Arduino also will be interfaces with the temperature sensor
where the sensor used to detect the grains temperature or
surrounding temperature inside the food tank. If the
temperature of the grains is lower than the set value, the
sensor will trigger the relay that control the lamp ON or OFF
to warm the remaining grains in the food tank to keep it fresh. Fig. 6. Actual Automatic Feeding Machine
So, the temperature sensors will active right before the amount

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 III. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
A. Controlling Grains Quantity from Storage
After several troubleshooting works that have been done,
the amount of grains needed is been calculated. The quantity
of grains and servo motor valve opening period need to be
proportional to the number of chicken being cater by the
breeder. The amount of grains released from storage is depend
on size of hole and period on valve opened. Figure 7 shown
the condition when the valve closed and open.
B. Temperature Control
In this project, one of the objectives is to maintain the
freshness of the grains during the feeding time. The
temperature sensor is used to control or maintain the grains
freshness. With this temperature sensor, the surrounding
temperature will be observing by the sensor and the sensor
will trigger the bulb to turn ON or OFF depending on the
current temperature of the grains container as shown in Table
III. To ensure the freshness of the grains, 240V 100Watt Bulb
were used where it can produce enough heat right after the
sensor detect the lower surrounding temperature of the grains
container as shown in Figure 8. However, when the
temperature value of the grains container is higher, bulb will
turn OFF as shown in Figure 9.
TABLE III. TEMPERATURE CONDITION AND BULB DECISION

NO. CONDITIONS DECISION

VALVE VALVE 1 Temp. < 29 Bulb turn ON
CLOSE OPEN 2 Temp. > = 33 Bulb turn OFF

Fig. 7. Valve Open and Close

Table I shows the experiment result of time for valve open

versus quantity of grains spill from the storage through the
hole in our prototyped automatic chicken feeder.
TABLE I. TIME FOR VALVE OPEN AND QUANTITY OF GRAINS

TIME FOR VALVE OPEN (ms) QUANTITY OF GRAINS (g)

1000 180
1500 220
2000 240

TABLE II. THE GRAINS PER CHICKEN NEED DAILY AND WEIGHT
OF CHICKEN THROUGHOUT WEEKLY PERIOD
Fig. 8. Temperature is less than 29◦C, Lamp bulb will Turn ON
WEEK GRAINS (g) WEIGHT OF
CHICKEN
1 13 30 to 120
2 25 310
3 34 500
4 40 1100
5 50 1300
6 60 1400
7 70 1600
8 80 1700

From result in Table 1 and data in the Table II, assuming

the number of chicken cater by breeder and weekly life peroid
of chicken in coop is known, the period of valve opening can
be determine to supply the quantity of grains needed. The
opening can be precongfigure within our Arduino program.
For example, for 20 chickens in Week 3, the amount of grains
need daily is 680g. Therefore for 3 times feeding daily, the
grains amount is 226g for 1 feeding time. The estimated valve
Fig. 9. Temperature is greater or equal to 33◦C, Lamp bulb will Turn OFF
opening period is around 1500ms.

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 When the automatic chicken feeder machine was
implemented, certain aspects must be considered in this part to
produce the best result, such as time taken for valves to
operate, the type of valve, comparison of the type of
temperature sensors, and the quantity and quality of grains.
Based on the simulation part, the first part of the Arduino is to
set up the time for the valve from the servo motor opens in 8
seconds each 8 hour. During the valve opened, the quantity of
grains from storage will be measured and tabulated on the
result. If the time taken for valve opened to take a long time, it
will cause the waste the grains. Otherwise, the quantity of the
grains is not enough to feed the chickens. The important thing
during the quantity of the grains is measured is the valve
selection. The size of the valve opening is a major factor in
determining the grains amount of feeding chickens. If the
valve is too big in size, the machine is difficult to control the
food flow from storage, but if choose the valve small size, the
foods flow from storage to the container in a small quantity
and not enough.
In this project work, the second part of the Arduino is to
control the temperature for freshness the grains. The
temperature will set up to turn on and turn off the bulb in the
simulation parts and it was measured depends on the type of
the temperature sensor. Some of the problems are observed
when the two temperature sensors are used, LM35 and
LM335. LM335 is better than LM35. LM335 are precision
and accuracy, easily calibrated, integrated circuit temperature
sensor and wider operating temperature range compared than
LM35. When measuring and processing the result, LM335 is
the sensor that gave the best result, but not from the LM35,
which gave strange values. To solve this problem, the circuit
must add a resistor 1K between the output from LM35 and the
ground. Type of bulb used is incandescent light bulb 240V
100W yellow color. The specifications of the bulb are a wide
range of sizes, light output, and voltage ratings, between 1.5V
to about up 200V. The function of the bulb in this project is to
heat up the grains to ensure the freshness of the grains during
the temperature controlled where the bulb can produce enough
heat for the grains. The lamps bulb can be replace but LED to
minimize the power consumption.
IV. CONCLUSION
The prototyped of Automatic Chicken Feder is
successfully implement using an Arduino Uno microcontroller
based system. Briefly, the project of Automatic Chicken
Feeder can reduce amount of manpower to feeding the
chickens since this is fully automatic. Owner no need to spent
monthly cost on hiring labor for feeding the chickens. By
implementing this concept of automatic feeding, it is possible
to optimize the feeding time where the feeding schedule will
be more efficient and the feeding time totally in automatic
mode, it can help the owner when outstation. This project
attempts at reducing labor and food wastage during feeding
time for breeders associated with small or medium scale
poultry farm. Moreover, the food hygiene is guaranteed to
maintain the healthy chickens during their feeding time. This
Automatic Chicken Feeder Machine capable of preventing the
food from being exposed to dirt by distribute food in a
container or plate.
978-1-5386-0908-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
By utilizing this opportunity many concepts are developed
for automatic feeding from those concepts we narrowed down
to the modest and affordable concept. This concept utilizes a
rotary valve to convey food to feeder by rotary motion
obtained by servo motor. Moreover, this machine also
supports to maintain the freshness and the nutritious food from
germs and bacteria with a closed container and by using
temperature sensor to detect the temperature in the container.
Furthermore, this project also has high potential being
commercialize as the machine can feed other animal such as
cat, bird and other pets while the owner being away from
home. Finally, the purpose of this project is to build a high
technology machine with a minimum cost that reasonable and
can be selling at any kind of industry.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research is funded by LESTARI research grant –
“Variable Strength t-way Test Generation Strategy with Crash
Recovery Support” (File No: 600-RMI/DANA 5/3/LESTARI
(102/2015)) from Institute of Research Management &
Innovation (IRMI), Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM),
Malaysia.
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