I have these adorable silkie chickens, but have better things to do than to let them out every morning and close the coop at night after they get back in, so that was the first thing I had to fix. I had enough random hardware at home to open the door with a high torque RC servo:
once I got the servo validated, I connected it to an ESP8266 as a wifi controller
Here is the basic end result:
The one downside of the ESP8266 is at least the one I have with the firmware I'm using, does not have super reliable Wifi connectivity, so my server keeps track of it being there or not, and can remotely power cycle it as needed. Not ideal, but it works...
There are predators (hawks at least), so I had to add a full net around the area:
cute chickens
This is the door in action after I added a switch to control it locally and wrote code on my home controller to talk it is via wifi:
The last thing I wanted to add was a water level monitor, especially because I had issues with the dispenser leaking, and ending up without water, is bad obviously. My first plan was a predictable total failure;
looks wonderful, but it's not meant to stay in the water and the board, failed
2nd try with pins
oh look, lots of metal ended up in the water, of course!
So yeah, all those classes in middle school about electrolysis are not just to bore you, it is a real thing, and sending current to sense the water through conductors causes ions to move and metal too:
So, I tried again with new conductors and changed my code not to check for water constantly but only 20 seconds every hour. That's thankfully enough that it mostly stopped the issue I had:
