Project:Automated Chicken Door
| ProjectInfoBox Automated Chicken Door Control | |
|---|---|
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| Status: | nearly done |
| Initiator: | Martin |
| Team: | Martin |
| Tools Used: | Raspberry Pi |
| Software Used: | python |
Chicken are very useful animals. They provide meat and eggs and therefore got domesticated a long time ago. Unfortunately, having living chicken at home means a lot of stress. They are usually held in chicken coops in order to protect them from natural enemies like foxes during the night. Unfortunately, chicken tend to get up very early and want to be active outside of the coop. So when you are having chicken, you need to get up at sunrise in order to open the coop door for them.
Since a coop door is often basically just a piece of wood that gets moved, automating it should be fairly easy.
Hardware
In order to move the door, we need a motor and a possibility for the motor to move the door. In my case, the motor was found pretty easily: We had an old leftover electronic armchair, which was about to get thrown away. Since it´s motor is fairly powerful, I decided to save it from being thrown away and use it for the chicken door.
A nice advantage of doing so is the fact that the mentioned motor already included end-stops. These endstops lead to a defined motor movement. Now we have to find a possibility to make this motor movement fit perfectly to the needed movement of the door. For this, we can use the lever principle.
Will be added:
- pi
- RTC
- Relais
- Pictures
Software
The software is entirely written in python. It uses the ephem package to calculate sunrise and sunset at a defined position. At sunrise it opens the door, at sunset it closes the door.
