There are many free and excellent chicken and corn trackers out there for the sionChicken or sionCorn enthusiast. Many are given away freely via either being sent out by sionChicken groups, or finding the giveaways at some of the larger farmers markets. With each release of a new version of sionChickens, the developers have been quick to update these free tracking or notifying devices, and even for our little chicken pens, they are a godsend.
What Do They Do?
Most Tracker / Scanner devices will track your latest chickens and eggs on your land. This is helpful in knowing when there are new eggs laid on your land, and you can normally choose to be notified by either IM messages or emails (or both).
But recently I’ve learnt that the free scanners are often limited by Second Life limitations. This became relevant with the introduction of SionCorn about ten days ago. My neice, Pacific, went out and planted some up on a spare hill to see what happened with them. Each corn cob put down to grow stems and plants can grow up to 8-9 stems, and 1-2 corn cobs on each of those. AND each plant requires 18 prims. For those getting properly into farming of sionCorn, knowing exactly how many stems and cobs are growing is extremely important, particularly if they are juggling the prim requirements. The freely available new sionCorn trackers or monitors were excellent in the fact that some pointed out with little arrows exactly where your new stems were (and initially they are tiny and easily not noticed, especially if you’ve got poor eyesight or camera control like I do) but those sionCorn trackers are limited to only showing 16 of each (a second life limitation).
For those like us, this isn’t much of a problem, asPacific is only growing a couple of cobs as an experiment or hobby. But for larger farms, there was a need for some way around this for keeping track of the precense, and arrival of more corn stems and cobs.
A Solution for SionCorn
The SionCorn Scanner Package
Giddy Phillip has now developed a commercial tracking device for corn (there is also one for V11 chickens available), which gets around this limitation of identifying only 16 objects. The SionCorn Scanner is only 1 prim, and costs L$200, available from The Egg Ranch.
I purchased this myself, to give to Pacific, and the results were surprising. Previously our freebie corn tracker had told us that we had 11 Roots, and 16 cobs found. Occasionally I would get a notification that the tracker had found a cob, then immediately that the cob no longer existed.As there isn’t much known about cobs and corn at the moment, I put it down mistakenly to the fact we somehow weren’t getting the watering times or fertiliser mix correct. Now I know better…
With the ER SionCorn Scanner we now have the 11 roots (not surprised by that one) but wait – 24 cobs detected (!) That’s extremely important news to Pacific, because apparently the cobs will be maturing in a few more days, and without knowing some of them existed, we may have had some accidental and prim-intensive growth spurts of new roots and plants unattended.She also pointed out that she needed to know, to work out how many cobservers we will need to purchase – cobservers store the mature cobs to be made into food for the chickens.
The scanner also has a pointer function – a multiple pointer function. One of the freebie trackers has little white arrows which can point out the stems, but the SionCorn Scanner does more than this. Not only are we shown where the roots are (green pointers) but a yellow pointer shows where the cobs are – one for each cob. This has finally allowed me, with my poor eyesight, to see the couple of roots which are sporting three cobs, and not the average two. Well done, SionCorn Scanner.I consider it a wise investment and gift for the corn farmer.
Now, I’ll spend a little more time looking to place V12 and V11 scanners for the chickens to make sure we are all aware of the eggs being laid on our land also.
SLurl : The Egg Ranch
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Yes most object scanners of any kind only detect 16 objects, and in the chicken and egg scanners, it can pick up other objects like pens, toys, etc. The way the trackers get around that limit is to rez remote scanners so they can pick up more than 16 objects each. All the UUIDs are compared to remove duplicates and ta-da, a scanner that gets around the 16 object limit.
I hope this wasn’t too geeky. hehe