FDA’s Approval Of Cell Culture Chicken: The Rise Of Fresh Meat Without The Animal?

On November 14th of this year, the FDA cleared the path for Upside Foods to sell its cell-culture-based chicken products within the US. This is the first product of its kind to be cleared for commercial sale within the Americas, with only Singapore having previously cleared a similar product for sale, back in December of 2020. This latter product comes courtesy of another California start-up called Eat Just.

Since that initial approval in Singapore, Eat Just has begun to set up a 2,800 square meter (~30,000 square feet) production facility in Singapore that is scheduled to begin producing thousands of kilograms of slaughter-free meat starting in the first quarter of 2023. This would make it the top-runner in the cultured meat industry, which to this point has seen dozens of start-ups, but precious few actual products for sale.

With CEO Josh Tetrick of Eat Just projecting price equality between their cultured meat and meat from animals by 2030, could the FDA’s approval herald the dawn of slaughter-free meat? There are obviously still hurdles, but as we’ll see, the idea is not nearly as far-fetched as one might think.

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DIY Chicken McMansion Is A Real Hen House

You might recognize [Robert Dunn] from his YouTube channel Aging Wheels, where he hacks on all sorts of automotive delights. On his other channel, Under Dunn, [Robert] tends to focus on building things. In this case, his nine chickens grew a bit, and he needs a new coop for his twenty chickens, three turkeys, and two geese. The build, the video, and the outcome are all typical of [Robert Dunn]’s videos- that is to say fun, informative, and easy to follow along with.

Rather than building on to his existing coop that was designed for less than a dozen chickens, [Robert] decided to start from scratch. Using CAD to overcomplicate matters at every possible step, the build flies together with impressive speed- but never quite takes off until the very last moment.

The video highlights all the things we want to see: The CNC’ing, the fails (including one very large fall-flat-on-your-face moment), the recovery from the fails, routed butt joints, and screen door handles. It’s also got all of the overengineered goodness we’ve all come to love. You’ll also enjoy his solution to moving, then fixing, then finally installing the coop.

If you enjoyed this, and watching people fail, check out [Robert]’s Fail Of The Week that we featured a while back.

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Columbia Decides 3D Printed Food Tastes Like Chicken

Researchers at Columbia have used multi-wavelength lasers to cook 3D-printed chicken. Apparently, it tastes like chicken. We were not overly surprised that 3D printed chicken protein cooked up to taste like chicken, but, then again, you have to do the science.

While additive manufacturing is the latest buzzword for all kinds of manufacturing, there’s also been a variety of attempts to 3D print food. We’ve seen pizza printers and fake steak printers, too. It makes sense that you don’t want to print raw food — the finished product needs to be cooked. You can see several videos about the process, below.

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Appeasing Chicken Tastes With 3D Printing

Like most of us, [Hunter] and his partner [Katyrose] have been in quarantine for the past few months. Unlike most of us, they spun a 3D printed chicken playground design hackathon out of their self-isolation. The idea is simple: to build a playground full of toys custom-tailored to appease each chicken’s distinctive taste. The execution, however, can be proven a little tricky given that chickens are very unpredictable.

For each of the four select chickens in their coop, the couple designed separate toys based on their perceived interests. One, showing a fondness for worms, inspired the construction of a tree adorned with rice noodles in place of the living article, and moss to top it off. For late-night entertainment, the tree is printed in glow-in-the-dark filament. The others were presented with a print-in-place rotating mirror disguised as a flower, and a pecking post covered in peanut butter and corn. As a finishing piece, the fourth toy is designed as a jungle gym post with a reward of bread at the top for the chicken who dares climb it. Since none of the chickens seemed interested in it, they were eventually hand-fed the bread.

With no other entries to their hackathon, [Hunter] declared themselves as the winners. The 3D files for their designs are available for their patrons to print, should they have their own chicken coops they want to adorn. While the hackathon might’ve been a success for them, their chickens in particular seemed unimpressed with their new toys, only going to show that the only difference between science and messing around is writing it down, or in this case, filming the process. If you’re looking for other ways to integrate your chickens into the maker world, check out this Twitch-enabled chicken feeder, or this home automation IoT chicken coop door. Meanwhile, check out the video about their findings after the break.

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Human-Powered Henhouse Keeps Chickens On The Job

While it’s not exactly in the same vein as other projects around here, like restoring vintage video game systems or tricking an ESP32 to output VGA, keeping chickens can also be a rewarding hobby. They make decent pets and can also provide you with eggs. You can also keep them on a surprisingly small amount of land, but if you have a larger farm you can use them to help condition the soil all over your property. For that you’ll need a mobile henhouse, and as [AtomicZombie] shows, they don’t all have to be towed by a tractor.

This henhouse is human-powered, meaning any regular human can lift it up and scoot it around to different areas without help from heavy equipment. It uses a set of bicycle wheels which rotate around to lift up the frame of the house. A steering wheel in the back allows it to be guided anywhere and then set down. It also has anti-digging protection, which is a must-have for any henhouse to keep the foxes out.

We like this one for its simplicity and ease-of-use. Not needing a tractor on a small farm can be a major cost savings, but if you really need one, [AtomicZombie] also designed a robust all-electric tractor-like device that we featured a little while back.

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Feeding Chickens, With Style

Ah, the joys of domestic animals. Often adorable, occasionally useful, they’re universally unable to care for themselves in the slightest. That’s part of the bargain though; we take over responsibility for their upkeep and they repay us with whatever it is they do best. Unless the animal in question is a cat, of course – they have their own terms and conditions.

Chickens, though, are very useful indeed. Give them food and water and they give you delicious, nutritious, high-quality protein. Feeding them every day can be a chore, though, unless you automate the task. This Twitch-enabled robotic chicken feeder may be overkill for that simple use case, but as [Sean Hodgins] tell it, there’s a method to all the hardware he threw at this build. That would include a custom-welded steel frame holding a solar panel and batteries, a huge LED matrix display, a Raspberry Pi and camera, and of course, food dispensers. Those are of the kind once used to dispense candy or gum for a coin or two in the grocery; retooled with 3D-printed parts, the dispensers now eject a small scoop of feed whenever someone watching a Twitch stream decides to donate to the farm that’s hosting the system. You can see the build below in detail, or just pop over to Sweet Farm to check out the live feed and gawk at some chickens.

It’s an impressive bit of work on [Sean]’s part for sure, and we did notice how he used his HCC rapid prototyping module to speed up development. Still, we’re not convinced there will be many donations at $10 a pop. Then again, dropping donations to the micropayment level may lead to overfed chickens, and that’s not a good thing.

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A Better Motor For Chickenwalkers

The last decade or so has seen remarkable advances in motor technology for robotics and hobby applications. We’re no longer stuck with crappy brushed motors, and now we have fancy (and cheap!) stepper motors, brushless motors for drones, and servo motors. This has led to some incredible achievements; drones are only barely possible with brushed motors, and you can’t build a robot without encoders.

For his entry into the Hackaday Prize, [Gabrael Levine] is taking on one of the hardest robotics challenges around: the bipedal robot. It’s a chickenwalker, or an AT-ST; either way, you need a lot of power in a very small space, and that’s where the OpenTorque Actuator comes in. It’s a quasi-direct-drive motor that was originally pioneered by the MIT Biomimetics Lab.

The key feature of the OpenTorque Actuator is using a big brushless motor, a rotation encoder, and a small, 8:1 planetary gear set. This allows the motor to be backdrivable, capable of force-sensing and open-loop control, and because this actuator is 3D printed, it’s really cheap to produce.

But a motor without a chassis is nothing, and that’s where the Blackbird Bipedal Robot comes in. In keeping with best practices of robotic design, the kinematics are first being tested in simulation, with the mechanical build happening in parallel. That means there’s some great videos of this chickenwalker strutting around (available below), and so far, everything looks great. This bipedal robot can turn, walk, yaw, and work is continuing on the efforts to get this bird-legged bot to stand still.