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Our chicken cam lasted the the entire time our first chickens did. We had gumbo made with our hens last week. Fish eye and the other hens gave us many eggs. It is getting close to the time when we will get new chicks, and it is also time to clean the chicken cam. This is an interesting experiment in x86 hardware. Taking a regular old PC motherboard and case without special filtering and bolting it to the top of a moveable backyard chicken coop for a couple of years is quite a torture test. The fact that the box lasted through the heat, cold, dampness, and dust is quite an accomplishment. This box was running a customized version of GNU/Linux described in this article on video for crackers and this article on archiving the camera snapshots. It is time to clean up the box, in preparation for the spring chicks.
Here is a picture of the motherboard:
Here is a picture of the DIMM:
Here you can see the memory expansion sockets on an ATI video card:
Believe it or not, we just blew all the dust away with an air nozzle and she is working just fine. We'll see how long this IDE drive can take it. We figure the drive will go eventually, and we'll reinstall then. It is amazing how clean a blast of air from a compressor can get this. It really does look like new. Don't be doing this, though, unless you want to risk hurting your motherboard, as static electricity, moisture, and oil residue could cause problems. We kinda want to see how long this box can run if we just blow some air at it between hens.
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