Waking up at 5:30 in the morning. [Mark Stead] didn’t like the idea either when his chickens started crying to be let out. One simple solution obviously is to eat the chickens build an automatic door opener. The mechanism starts out with an old style mechanical alarm clock, add a geared motor with some creative switch work to pull open the door, weather proof the entire thing, and done. [Mark] even modified the setup later to work with vertical doors. No MCU required for either.
Pair this with an automated feeder system, egg gathering and cooking setup, and you’re half way to having your breakfast ready for you when you wake up in the morning – around noon like the rest of us.
[Thanks MS3FGX]
Brilliant.
eat the chickens
brilliant…
(Original recipe please)
Love it!
Are these ‘battery’ hens?
Talk about having your [s]cake[/s] eggs and eatting it too.
Lets add a automatic coffee maker, and a cow milker machine, and we can have Breakfast Doc Brown/ Jetsons style.
Err… the word CAKE was supposed to be strike though.
Chickens are oh so spoiled these days. Back in the day, the chickens would let themselves in and out by walking thru the doorway in the coop.
_That_ is a hack. Very cool way to do it.
Well done sir. I love me some MCU hacks, but this is such a simple and elegant solution without the need for anything overkill.
eat the chickens eating the chickens could have been a great example of hatchet hackery
pass the axe
@vonskippy In old Mother Russia, the chickens let YOU out.
Very nice hack with excellent documentation and pictures.
I was a bit surprised to learn that these sort of clocks now use an electric motor to strike the bells, I suppose I am just too used to the idea that they are wind-up mechanical. Now that I see how easy these are to repurpose, I can think of a few applications for it.
Collecting and frying eggs!! think Dick Van Dyke has the patent on that one in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
What if one of the chickens is standing at the door step when its time to close the door ?…
Finally a hack worthy of an Arduino. Add a solar cell to power it. Don’t forget the blinking LED.
Now if he could only train the chickens to wind the clock, he’d be done.
Holy crap, and he didn’t even use a stinkin’ arduino!
Rube Goldberg would be proud !
Wicked!
Next step: rooster sound effects! :-)
Chickens waking you up too early?
Turn the joke on them by setting up an alarm clock and opening the blinds on them every morning.