On a poultry farm, weighing birds is not just a matter of putting a load cell under a platform. A poultry weighing system has to run continuously in a harsh environment, withstand cleaning procedures and still make sense of weighings that happen without an operator.

ECK developed for Trinovati a scale intended to be part of a broader poultry monitoring solution. The goal was to automatically track the birds’ weight gain throughout the grow-out cycle and send that data to the monitoring system.

A poultry weighing system in a harsh environment

One of the main challenges was the installation site itself.

The scale stays inside the poultry house, exposed to a harsh environment and to waste from the birds. On top of that, the equipment has to allow frequent cleaning.

So the development could not consider the electronics alone. Mechanical construction, protection of boards and components and ease of cleaning had to be designed together.

The goal was to reduce exposure of internal parts and mechanical elements prone to corrosion, making the equipment robust enough for continuous operation in the poultry house.

The scale had to interpret the birds on the platform

There was another, less obvious problem: the birds use the scale freely.

At some moments there may be one bird on the platform; at others, two or more. Simply logging every value from the load cell would produce a large amount of useless data.

Processing logic had to be implemented to analyze the weighings and compare them with the expected pattern for that flock.

This way, the system could tell apart readings consistent with the weight of a single bird from situations where more than one bird was on the scale at the same time.

Tracking flock growth and uniformity

The goal was not only to know the average weight.

By tracking weighings throughout the grow-out cycle, it becomes possible to follow weight gain and flock uniformity, checking whether the birds are converging toward the target weight range.

This matters because uniformity affects the later processing stages. In slaughtering and industrial processing, equipment is set up according to bird size.

A flock with more uniform weights makes that setup easier and processing more predictable.

Automatic weighing therefore provides feedback during grow-out: instead of finding out only at the end that the flock had an unsuitable weight distribution, the producer can follow its evolution over time.

24-bit sigma-delta converter for weighing

To acquire the load cell signal we used the Cirrus Logic CS5530, a 24-bit sigma-delta A/D converter.

This component offered good performance at a suitable cost for a weighing application, allowing us to work with the small signals coming from the measurement chain.

The acquisition electronics were integrated with the embedded processing responsible for handling the weighings and for the device’s communication.

ESP32, Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN

The scale had to be part of the farm’s monitoring system, so two wireless communication options were provided.

The ESP32 provided processing and Wi-Fi connectivity, while LoRa communication was handled by a HopeRF RFM95 module.

Using these technologies made it possible to fit the communication to each installation. Wi-Fi could be used where infrastructure was available, while LoRa offered a wireless alternative within the monitoring architecture developed for the application.

Mechanical, electronic and firmware engineering working together

This project shows a common trait of electronic products for agribusiness: the biggest challenge often does not lie in the electronic circuit alone.

The scale had to combine mechanical robustness, environmental resistance, ease of cleaning, low-level signal acquisition, weighing processing and wireless communication.

Beyond measuring weight, the firmware had to turn a stream of readings produced spontaneously by the birds into useful information about flock growth and uniformity.

See other electronic engineering projects developed by ECK.