When I initially started to look for automated coop doors, I found a number of solutions that seemed to work great. Most of these solutions use a setup that relies on either time or ambient light-level to know when to close the door to the coop. Both approaches have their pros and cons, but the main problem I ran into was the fact there is always the assumption being made that the chickens have all entered the coop before the door closes. While I love my chickens, theyre not always the brightest. This means that there are times where I go outside at night to shut the coop and one or two of them have yet to actually enter the coop. The goal of this project is to implement a time or light based solution but also add a camera on the outside that can recognize the chickens and open the door if they are still outside after the door has been shut.
Here I will be listing the resources used when building the project, whether they be online tutorials, articles, or codebases from github.
Eric Escobar's Automated Chicken Door (https://github.com/ericescobar/Chicken_Door)
- Hardware, schematics, general inspiration