Background

Team x86’s design project is a cheap, reasonably self contained chicken housing that will keep chickens healthy on a barge in New York during summertime. The context of our design project comes from the WaterPod Project, which is an attempt at sustainable water top living via the fusion of art and design. It is a collaborative effort to establish a communal living space that produces its own consumables, and people from all over the world are working to get the barge ready for its maiden voyage in the summer of 2009. It will travel for 6 months, to 6 ports in New York with the joint goals of supporting the life of its six human occupants and spreading awareness about sustainable living.

Objective

The coop is designed to supplement the dietary needs of the inhabitants while providing a comfortable shelter for the chickens living on WaterPod for the 6 month voyage.

Introduction

Introduction

Client Requests

Project Requirements

Overview

The criteria that determined the design of the project was extracted from the best aspects of our alternative designs (Figure 1). Each Criteria is explained in detail

Cost

The maximum allowed budget for each design is $225. The least costly design is favorable due to this restriction.

Ease of Assembly

Two adults must be able to assemble the coop in one day given our instructions and adequate tools.

Chicken Safety

The Coop must prevent the Chickens from sustaining any injury.

Figure 1: Weighted Criteria

Chicken Health

The coop must shelter the chickens from the elements, keep them warm and cool enough, and give them non drafty air flow. They also need soft and absorbent bedding to nest in. Their dietary needs must also be addressed by the design.

Ease of Transportation

Because the project must be shipped long distance in limited space it needs to be collapsible so it can fit in a small area.

Durability

The coop needs to last at least six months; the longer the better.

Adaptability

The coop needs to be an artistic workspace as well as a house for chickens. The more opportunities for artistic collaboration there are the better.

Ease of Maintenance

The coop should be as easy to clean and maintain as possible, the maintenance of the coop should take around two and a half hours per week.

User Safety

The coop must be free of any hazards to the user; it should present no risk of serious injury and as minimal risk of minor injury as possible.

Project Design

Specifications

The Coopatron 50000 is very inexpensive as it was built mostly from recycled building materials. The design has ventilation panels that keep the chickens from asphyxiating as a result of their waste products. A ten gallon trash can contains feed and is located separately from the chicken coop, and standard chicken water dispenser is located on the floor of the coop. The bedding material is designed to be recycled as a bulking agent for the composting toilette. The coop will also be used as a canvas for any artistic additions the occupants of the barge wish to include. Our design can be adapted as a canvas for paints or other artistic additions because of the large flat panels. There are access panels for cleaning and egg collection in the design, and there is nothing in the design of the Coopatron 5000 that presents a hazard to the person maintaining it.

Finished Design

The final chicken coop solution is coined the Coopatron 5000. The design integrates research from the literature review and designs from each of alternative solutions. It has the capacity to house ten chickens comfortably on a barge in New York City in the summer. The overall description for the coop as well as an analysis of the project costs and instructions for use of the coop are presented in this section. Section IV is the description of our decision making process. In order to choose the best design we used a Delphi matrix to compare each alternative listed in section III to each other and against the criteria from Section II.

Costs

Construction cost is the total cost of the materials used for the project. In Table III you can see two columns for cost, one is the real cost to us and the other is the potential cost if the component was not free or purchased by the client.

CoopatronMaterialsCosts2.jpg

Maintenance



CoopatronMaintenanceTime2.jpg

http://www.appropedia.org/images/5/56/CoopatronMaintenanceSchedule5000.pdf

Information and Contact Details

Teamx86.jpg

Links


The WaterPod Project - http://www.thewaterpod.org/
Engineering 215: Introduction to Design - http://www.appropedia.org/Category:Engr215_Introduction_to_Design
Lonny Grafman - http://www.appropedia.org/User:Lonny
HSU Environmental Resources Engineering Department - http://www.humboldt.edu/~ere_dept/
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