21–30 of 62 posts
I have a door from Run-Chicken, mechanically it's still good but the electronics went out in it. I'd love to have something like this running it, going to give it a shot.
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As for neighbors, just don't get a rooster. Hens do make some noise but they're not bad at all. As for foxes, you can use a mobile coop+run. Move it once per day to provide fresh grass and distribute the fertilizer byproduct.
Yeah, if I did it I'd want the area to be fenced in because one of my neighbors is nosy. It's a 1/4 acre plot, so not exactly a huge amount of land. I know that my neighbors down the street have chickens because I occasionally hear them, but their yard is completely fenced in. I only know them well enough for casual greetings when we see them in passing, and there's a language barrier preventing more in depth convers…
A project I've always toyed with in my head is a fancier version that would count / verify the checks have all entered the coop at closing time and warn you if not. With my parents coop occasionally a chicken will decide to brave the night outside, often to disastrous consequences. Figuring out how to build a low-energy version is challenging, but necessary since the whole system runs off small solar panels and a 12v…
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I looked up the ordinance, and I was wrong about a few things. Livestock or poultry may be kept provided that there are no more than 4. So I was wrong about the limit -- it's less than five and not five or less. Also: * I need to have a 1 acre parcel, and I have only a bit over 0.25 * It needs to be 25 feet from all property boundaries and fenced in, which limits placement options So my options, for this plot, are ni…
I have 12 on a 1/2 acre plot, about 2/3rds of which is backyard they can access (so call it 1/3 acre of roaming). That amount seems more than ample, though these are pretty bougie chickens. Four in even 1/8 acre should be fine.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_12,_Farm_Anim...
So, 1/8 acre could hold 3,630 “cage free” chickens, in theory (I am not condoning this).
In you don’t need much space to keep chickens happy. However, they produce a lot of dust, and can’t be kept in a house.
* Pi for timing/wifi/status/webserver.
* Opened at 8am, closed at civil twilight. Or whenever I hit the button on the webserver, or the switch board.
* Limit switches.
* Mechanical swing lock for raccoon protection
* Electric drill + rope for the vertical sliding door
* Relay for direction, power mosfet for the drive controller.
* Intermediate board between the 3.3v controller and the 12V power board.
* Lead acid battery + charger for the power.
The door was pretty hefty, and was _solid_. 1/2 or 3/4 ply IIRC. The drill wound up being a mistake, because the power was too high, managed to fry some relays before I got everything worked out. The limit switches were generally pretty good, but they were also pretty well protected by the door design.
The best bug was that the wifi worked really well during the day, but not at night. Turns out that the LOS between the wifi dongle and the AP went through the roost, and chickens absorb enough wifi signal to drop it off the net. So one 3m usb cable later, and the dongle was on the other side of the roost. Solid networking from then on.
Sadly I left it in the coop when moving out.
"Certainly, here's your code snippet presented in a more readable manner:" Using ChatGPT to do your README is a good idea, just need to proof read it ;)
A design with limit switches instead of counting turns seems like it would be much more reliable. e.g. https://www.floweringelbow.org/automated-door-from-an-old-wi... That way the software can be nearly stateless: 1. Check time and determine desired state (open or closed) 2. Compare desired state against limit switches and run motor until the limit switch is hit (or it times out which is an error) On the other hand,…
Chickens are incredibly dirty animals. The limit switches would probably be fouled (fowled?) pretty quickly. Commercial versions of this can measure motor load (via current), but still require manual calibration. I wonder if they thought they could get away with manual calibration, but couldn’t make it reliable. I think these people are the market leaders: https://www.chickenguard.com/ Note that the commercial versio…
I think it's also possible to design it such that both upper and lower limit switches are placed higher up on the edge of the door, rather than strictly at the top and bottom, which should help with the fouling.
Practically though, any automated system will be vulnerable to fouling/blockage and require regular maintenance to keep the mechanism clear and clean enough to avoid premature corrosion (chicken poop being pretty acidic). In my opinion, it's a pipe dream to have a fully automated coop in a backyard setting and not eventually/occasionally have failures that require manual intervention or lead to neglect and losses due to predation. Better to think of such systems as tools to relax the timing requirements for manual care. Instead of doing all the work at the right times, one can confirm that the animals are out/fed/watered/in/etc as part of doing the normal morning/evening rounds/chores.
Second would be adding a good lock to the door -- raccoons are very crafty, and love stealing eggs
I did this in the Raspberry Pi 1 era. * Pi for timing/wifi/status/webserver. * Opened at 8am, closed at civil twilight. Or whenever I hit the button on the webserver, or the switch board. * Limit switches. * Mechanical swing lock for raccoon protection * Electric drill + rope for the vertical sliding door * Relay for direction, power mosfet for the drive controller. * Intermediate board between the 3.3v controller an…
That sounds like a chicken motion detection system to me.