wvmarle:
Something else (just reading your code): I've heard before that fluorescent lights are pretty torturous to chickens as they can actually see the flicker (their eyes are much faster than ours).Overall I don't see any great optimisations possible for this code. The only thing is that the indentation is not always correct - do a Ctrl-T in the IDE to automatically fix that.
I am going to look into the fluorescent thing, Ive been running this way for a while now and production never seems to drop off until the height of the summer (central Texas is brutal in July and August) but I get full egg production through the winter when many friends and neighbors fall off. But It would be an easy swap to change out the lighting to an LED system.
I did notice a MARKED improvement in the performance the past day since i added the serialDebug variable and made most of the serial print statements IF (serialDebug) statements.
The pushbutton response times are much much faster.