Comment by wiredfool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiredfool | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

What happens if the door closes at night and one or more chickens aren't already inside? Is that a thing that happens? Do they pretty much always go inside at the same time every evening? Is it bad if one gets left out alone?

I know nothing about chicken coops.

A former colleague of mine spent a bunch of time adding computer vision to his coup control project for exactly this reason.

But turns out, chickens just naturally go into the coup at sunset and it's completely unnecessary.

Point of order: A chicken coop is where chickens live. A chicken coup is what directly precedes coq au vin.

It happens that one might get left out and it's no problem unless a predator shows up :)

If a chicken isn't in the coop by the time the sun is setting, then they don't want to be in the coop and you would have to manually intervene anyways. It's always the same chicken(s) too. They want to roost in a tree or on the roof or something. If one of your chickens develops this habit, the best way to break it is to keep them locked in the coop for a few days as soon as you realize what's happening.

But barring that situation, chickens always go in the coop. I can tell it's 15 minutes to sunset when the chickens start ambling up the ramp.

It wasn't really an issue, They'd go in between sunset and one of the twilight light levels, and that was that. When we did it without the automatic door, there was a lot more chasing type manual labor just getting them in if it was early, or we'd forget and it would be super late.

Didn't ever lose one at night, but there were definitely daytime predators that were an issue. (mainly raptors)

> 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.

That sounds like a chicken motion detection system to me.

Chicken presence anyway.

I tell you the bugs you see when deploying something in the real world...

Field work always finds the "what the heck" bugs that lab work never could.

And the chickens will eat the bugs when you deploy them to the real world..

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