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| Tieng and his hatcher |
Tieng, a university student from Quang Ngai, has created an egg hatcher with the high success rate of up to 90 percent. The machine is being used widely at local farms.
Tieng’s family runs one of the largest farms in the locality, and he understands the difficulties farmers face.
He said there is a big price gap of up to VND15,000 between the eggs produced under a hatchery and hatched chickens.
“My parents, who have been farming for dozens of years, have been using the manual incubation method which has a low success rate. In many cases, hatched chickens have deformities,” he said.
Tieng vowed to create an automatic hatcher which can give a high success rate.
It took Tieng many days to find the most ideal conditions for eggs to hatch, including temperature, humidity and frequency of egg turning.
Tieng has created an automated system for his incubator using an Arduino microcontroller to control parts of the machine using IoT technology.
“You can operate the machine from anywhere if you have a smartphone,” Tieng said. “The production cost of my machine is just VND4 million, or half of the price of the other products available in the market.”
The incubator invented by Tieng can treat 300 eggs concurrently and eggs will hatch after 21 days. The machine consists of a heat generator using infrared light which emits heat during the hatching process. The light from the lamp does not hurt the birds' eyes.
There is also a humidifier to create moisture by spraying mist using ultrasonic waves, and a water supply system.
The disinfection bulbs using ultraviolet rays in the machine can help destroy or deactivate microorganisms, kill bacteria, and clean eggs and the incubator.
The advantage of Tieng’s incubator is that it gives a high success rate. This has been confirmed by neighboring households which use the machine.
Nguyen Quoc Bao, a lecturer at Pham Van Dong University, believes the machine can be commercialized as there is a high demand for it.
“Tieng can continue to do research to optimize the product and develop a startup in the field of automation,” he said.
