Microcontroller based environmental control for swiftlet nesting with SMS notification

Swiftlet nests naturally have a high economic value, and hence attract many attentions. Traditional swiftlet nesting generally incorporates manual environmental control. The nesting house's guard might forget or fail to control the environment for many reasons. In this work, a microcontroller based system that will automatically control the temperature and humidity of the nesting house to a condition convenient for the swiftlets were developed. The controller is connected to a monitoring computer which can be 45 m away. The computer will report the status and alarm remotely by sending SMS to the guard and the owner of the nesting house in certain circumstances. A miniature model was made for this development. Functionality and performance of the system were studied on this model. The performance of the sensor as key part of the developed system was verified to commercial instruments. The characteristics of the system were analyzed to obtain the relationship between water that put into the nesting house with the temperature and humidity. A scaling rule is proposed for utilizing the experimental results for applications in realistic nesting houses.