u4gubbins do you have much experiance breeding quail?? hatching them is the easy part getting them to 6 weeks is a nightmare
if you dont have alot of experiance give me a shout i have been breeding birds for over 30 years so i can give you some tips if needed
I first got into raising quail when I found some adults for sale at $2 each. I don't know what kind they are, but they look like a small variety of coturnix. They layed 24, eggs out of which only one hatched.
The hatchling is now an adult.
At one time I had 14 quail. All of them have either escaped or been eaten by cats, except the one I hatched.
I solved the cat and escape problems by using 1/2 inch hardware wire.
I have also attempted to raise California valley quail. These quail all died, along with my bantam chicks, because of carbon monoxide.
The weather had cooled down so I put them in our basement to keep them warm. Unfortunately the basement is right next to a driveway. Enough said?
I have hatched bantam eggs before. however, the hatch rate has always been low and the number of cripples per hatch has always been high.
The biggest problem is the fact that our average summer humidity is 13% in the hatch room. Even soaked sponges have a hard time keeping the humidity up inside the incubators. Also, the temperature varies quite drastically in spring and early summer.
this is why I am building an incubator with an ultrasonic humidifier.
The sensors that are going into this circuit are far more accurate than you would expect in an incubator. This is a good thing.
By using a PIC I can set it at the temperature and humidity I want and the outside environment should have little effect. if this does fail I will use a full size desktop computer to control the blasted thing. I can set up a program that compensates for any changes in the outside environment. Any additional sensors or relays can be run by way of the printer port (Linux will let you do that) or USB. One advantage a PC has over the PIC is the size of the program it can run. I could set it up to keep the temp/ humidity at whatever level for whatever amount of time and it can change as often as the eggs need it to. I don't remember the numbers but the temperature and humidity change for the last few days of incubation. So the goal here is to provide the ideal environment at all times, even when the ideal changes.