Poultry Shed Climate Controller with Ammonia Alerts for Small Broiler Farms
A final year project that builds an ESP32 climate monitor and fan controller for small broiler and layer sheds: temperature, humidity and ammonia sensing, automatic fan and cooling pad staging, and SMS alarms when power or ventilation fails. It targets farms that cannot afford imported shed controllers and lose birds in heat waves.
Intermediate
A small team, or one strong student willing to learn something new.2 semesters · 3 students
7 to ship
3 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- Two or more sensor nodes spaced along the shed reporting temperature, humidity and ammonia every minute over Wi-Fi or ESP-NOW to a controller.
- A controller that stages fans and evaporative cooling pads from a target temperature curve that follows bird age in days, with manual override switches.
- Calculated heat stress index from temperature and humidity shown per zone, with alerts when it crosses a configurable threshold.
- SMS alarms through a GSM module for high temperature, high ammonia, sensor failure and mains power loss, working without internet.
- A dashboard with flock age, zone readings, fan run hours and a daily report the farm manager can export.
- A field log from at least one full flock cycle, or a minimum of three weeks, on a real shed with notes on every alarm.
- A bill of materials with local prices and a mounting guide that keeps sensors away from direct fan airflow and water lines.
If you have time left
- Add a battery-backed controller that keeps sending alarms for an hour after mains power fails.
- Estimate daily water consumption from a flow meter on the drinker line and flag sudden drops, an early sign of illness.
- Support LoRa sensor nodes for long sheds where Wi-Fi is weak.
The problem small poultry farms face with shed climate
Broiler chickens are very sensitive to heat and bad air. In hot climates such as Pakistan's summer, a few hours of failed ventilation during a heat wave can kill a large share of a flock. Ammonia from litter builds up in closed sheds and harms bird health and weight gain. Large integrated farms use environmentally controlled houses with commercial controllers, but many small and medium farmers run open-sided or semi-closed sheds with fans switched by hand, a single dial thermometer, and a worker who may be asleep when the fan breaker trips at 3 a.m.
What already exists and the gap
- dol-sensors (Denmark) makes professional ammonia and climate sensors for poultry houses that connect to farm climate controllers. They are built for commercial houses and priced accordingly.
- Renke and similar Chinese suppliers sell poultry environment monitoring kits with cloud dashboards, typically monitoring only, with no control and a subscription.
- Research prototypes: a 2025 Scientific Reports paper describes a low-cost IoT and GSM system that monitors temperature, humidity, ammonia and methane in poultry houses with early warning, built for well under a hundred US dollars.
The gap is a farmer-grade system that both monitors and controls, follows the bird-age temperature curve farmers already use, works on SMS when there is no internet, and is priced for a farmer who owns one or two sheds.
What you build
- Sensor nodes: ESP32 boards with a temperature and humidity sensor and an ammonia sensor, spaced along the shed.
- Controller: an ESP32 with a relay board driving fan contactors and cooling pad pumps, plus a GSM module for SMS.
- Backend: MQTT broker, time-series storage and an alert service.
- Dashboard: current zone readings, flock age, fan stages, alarms and daily reports.
Users: the farm owner, who sets the flock start date and target curve, and the shed worker, who receives SMS alarms and can override fans with physical switches.
The technically interesting part
Two problems make this more than a sensor dashboard. First, control: fans should come on in stages, cooling pads only when humidity allows evaporative cooling to work, and the controller must avoid switching contactors on and off every few seconds around a threshold. You will implement hysteresis and minimum run times, and justify them with data. Second, sensing ammonia cheaply: low-cost MQ-137 sensors drift and are cross-sensitive, while electrochemical cells are better but cost more. Part of the project is measuring both against a reference (borrow a handheld meter or use a known concentration setup in a lab) and reporting honestly which one is good enough for alarms.
How to evaluate it
- Sensor accuracy against a reference thermometer, hygrometer and ammonia meter at several points.
- Control behaviour: temperature held within a band of the target curve during a hot day, with a count of fan switching events per hour.
- Alarm latency: time from simulated fan failure or power cut to SMS received, repeated at least ten times.
- A farmer interview after the trial: which alarms were useful and which were noise.
Suggested plan
- Month 1: farm visit, requirement notes, sensor bench tests.
- Month 2: sensor nodes and data pipeline.
- Month 3: controller with staging, hysteresis and override switches, tested on small fans.
- Month 4: GSM alarms and power-failure detection.
- Month 5: dashboard, reports and installation in a real shed.
- Month 6 to 7: full flock trial, analysis and report.
Path to a product
The first customer is a farmer with one or two broiler sheds who has lost birds to heat. Sell the controller at a one-time price with installation, plus an optional yearly fee for the dashboard and SMS credit. Poultry feed companies and veterinary distributors visit these farms every week and are the natural sales channel. The same design adapts to mushroom rooms and greenhouses.
Scope warning
Do not try to replace a full commercial climate controller with heating, lighting programmes and feed lines in two semesters. Do not build a bird-counting camera or disease prediction model. Do not claim weight-gain improvements from one flock; you cannot separate the effect of your system from weather and feed.
Learn what you need on Sefism
- Programming roadmap : the language fundamentals behind reliable controller firmware.
- Backend roadmap : message queues, storage and alert services for the server side.
- Data analytics cheat sheet : turning a flock's worth of readings into a clear daily report.
- PostgreSQL Documentation : storing and querying time-series sensor readings.
- The Mom Test : how to interview farmers without leading them to the answer you want.
Get help with this idea
Most of the risk is in the farm trial, so plan access to a real shed early. If you want a second opinion on scope, hardware choices or how to set up the evaluation before you commit, bring your plan and your bill of materials and we will pressure-test it together. New here? Create a free account first.
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