In this thesis, an economical cow-farm automation system is proposed, which is especially suitable for the small to mid size cow farms. The use of the proposed system will greatly increase milk productivity while reducing the labor cost. The hardware of the proposed system is composed of ID transponders, receivers, milking machines, networking system, and PC. We use commercially available (imported) milking system hardware, receivers, and RF powered ID transponders which do not need the battery power. The networking system is implemented by modifying the existing key-telephone system manufactured and sold by the LG electronics. The resulting system allows multiple milking machines and ID indicators to be connected together.
The software of the automation system is composed of two parts; networking software and data transmission & management software. Data transmission & management software can be divided further into key system software and PC software. In this thesis we implement the entire transmission & management software while networking software is coded by modifying the existing key telephone system software, Data transmission connection uses the RS-232C protocol. Data management is done for individual cow with regard to its milk production, food consumption, weight and birth rate.
