Broken your diet already? The computerised chicken that can help you stay away from the biscuit cupboard

  • Scolding chicken developed at a workshop for children
  • Tiny computer that drives it costs just £28

A credit-card-sized computer that costs just £28 has been pressed into service to shame those already struggling with their new year's resolutions.

Academics at Manchester University's School of Computer Science have used the groundbreaking Raspberry Pi computer to power a fluffy chicken that keeps an eye on your stash of forbidden goodies and clucks out its concern if you weaken and open the cupboard.

And to make sure your shame is complete, it will also send a tweet to Twitter.

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Enlarge   Raspberry Pi chicken

Step away from the cake! Dr Andrew Robinson of Manchester University shows how a fluffy animatronic chicken and a tiny computer that costs just £28 can help you stick to your diet

The stool-pigeon chicken is powered by software written for a tiny add-on board for the Raspberry Pi.

The PiFace Digital plugs directly on top of your Raspberry Pi, allowing it to read switches connected to it.The challenge for budding programmers is to write a program to respond to the door opening or closing.

The guard-chicken is triggered by a sensor on the door of your biscuit cupboard. When the door is opened, the circuit is broken and the chicken issues its warning - and tells the Twitterverse that you're cheating on your diet.

The Manchester scientists say that the whole project only took 20 minutes to complete as it reused material from a previous project that drove the chicken's use of Twitter.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi computer is a tiny circuit board with a series of ports to connect it to USB devices and your television designed to fire up children's enthusiasm for computing

The idea for the bossy chicken was hatched at a workshop run by the university to encourage children to learn about computers.


The Raspberry Pi is a tiny no-frills computer that was designed to get children interesting in the nuts and bolts of computing.

Costing just £28, it comes with a processor that uses the ARM architecture, a British technology that is particularly good for small, light battery-operated devices. ARM processors power most of the world's mobile phones and many tablet computers.

The Raspberry Pi arrives without a case or any other peripherals: you have to add a keyboard and mouse, and plug it into a computer screen or your TV.

You also have to load the operating system yourself.

It can run a special version - or 'distro' - of Linux, the open-source operating system, called Raspbian.

Or you can load versions of Linux designed to run home media centres such as Raspbmc or Openelec.

There's even a version of Google's Android for the Raspberry Pi.

Aimed at getting kids interested in coding, the Pi however seems to have been more of a hit with their parents - the middle-aged geeks who remember the days when computing was a more rough and ready affair.

Those workshops have helped children make software for bird boxes that tweet and also to build interactive toys that react to the weather.

Dr Andrew Robinson of Manchester University said: 'One child even came up with a design for a device that politely reminds you to put the toilet seat down after use. The chicken idea was just one of those eureka moments - it just came to us. It's a bit of fun and an example of how the computer can be embedded into real life.'

The aim of the workshops is to encourage children to learn about computing. It seems that the always-on connected generation knows very little about how their devices actually work, and academics have warned that new university entrants have a very low level of technical knowledge.

The government wants to raise the standard of how computer science is taught in schools, and devices like the Raspberry Pi are part of that drive to raise the standard of knowledge.

Dr David Rydeheard, from the School of Computer Science, said: 'Schools have physics, chemistry and biology laboratories to teach these subjects.The combination of Raspberry Pi and PiFace creates a cheap personal laboratory for computer science that every child can own.'


The university is launching the Great British Raspberry Pi Bake Off competition challenging entrants to come up with useful gadgets to change the world using a Raspberry Pi.

VIDEO Step away from the biscuit tin! Raspberry Pie shames you into diet