Optimus Prime Keeps A Vigilant Watch Over The Hen-house

October 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[shOOter—] and his family are just starting to keep chickens and need a coop in which the hens could roost. He wanted it to be mobile and protective and what is more mobile and protective and the leader of the Transformers? As you can see, his chicken coop is modeled after Optimus Prime.

The cab of the truck serves as the hen-house. It’s made of marine grade plywood held together with glue and galvanized nails. The exhaust stacks, which are made of PVC pipe, are not just decorative. They are chutes for the feed trays to either side of the blue ramp (you can’t really see the trays in this image). To give the chickens a way to stretch their legs he brought his welding skills to bear. The trailer portion of the build is a welded metal frame covered in mesh which provides a rather large exercise yard. Since the habitat is enclosed there’s really no need for an intricate motorized door.

[Thanks James]

Chicken Coop Door Using Threaded Rod

May 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

There’s no rooster to wake them up, and [Steve] and his wife are fine with that. What they’re not fine with is having to get up early anyway in order to let the chickens out of the coop. Like many small-scale egg farmers they sought out an automatic solution for opening the coup in the morning.

[Steve] had seen a bunch of different automatic coup door hacks kicking around the Internet. But all of the ones he could find used a vertical door and pulleys. His setup has a door that opens horizontally and he realized that he needed to build some kind of linear actuator. What he came up with is a system built with hardware store parts. He’s using a plain old piece of threaded rod along with a coupling nut (they’re usually 3/4″ long or so). The nut is held firmly on the door using a conduit mounting bracket, while the threaded rod is turned by an electric screwdriver mounted to the jamb. Two limiting switches are made up of magnetic sensors often used to ring the door entry bell when you enter a store. An Arduino takes care of scheduling and controlling the motor for opening and closing the door. See for yourself in the high-production-value video after the break.

For what it’s worth, we have seen at least one rope and pulley door that slides horizontally.

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A Chicken Tractor To Call Home

April 26, 2011 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Dino] didn’t want to keep the baby chickens cooped up when he was at work, but he didn’t want them to escape, or become a juicy treat, either. His solution was to build this chicken tractor. It’s a complete chicken ecosystem with wheels, kind of like a double-wide trailer for our feathered friends. On one end is a small coop that contains food, water, and an incandescent light bulb for heat. The other end is a chicken-wire box that lets the young birds stretch their legs and get some fresh air.

It’s easy to see the wheels which flip down when [Dino] needs to move the contraption. Like we said, he puts it out when he goes to work, selecting different parts of the yard so that the grass gets evenly fertilized. It’s a nice solution if you don’t have enough area to dedicate to an automated chicken coop.

We’ve embedded [Dino’s] video after the break. He covers the beginning and end of the build, and fills the middle of the video with a time-lapse recording of the construction process.

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Fowl Accommodations Provided By Mathematics

February 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

[Anthony’s] chickens happily return to roost each night thanks to the spacious house he built for them. Sadly the geodesic dome never became the home of the future despite what the people were promised. But using a bit of unorthodox joinery you can create enclosures for your chickens or other animals in need of shelter.

The construction begins with 30 isosceles triangles and nine equilateral triangles which he cut from solid wood on a chop saw. To join the pieces he used metal banding and screws, which hold the edges close together but allow them to flex. This solved the problem of precision mitres at the edge of each wood piece. Once the dome was fully assembled he filled the joints with caulk and finished it with rubber roofing compound.

Our only question is: how’s he going to automate the door of the coop?

Using A Chicken As A Steadicam

December 11, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 61 Comments

This has been circulating around the net for a bit. For those that haven’t seen it, let me just give you a quick rundown of what is happening. This guy strapped a camera to a chicken’s head. No really, that’s it. There’s some interesting science behind it though. He’s taking advantage of the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex in the chicken. It is basically the reflex that we use to keep our eyes firmly focused on something while our head is moving. In a chicken however, they move their entire head. This means that he can strap a camera to the chicken’s head and have an instant steadicam. At least that is the theory. As you can see in the video after the break, the harder part is getting the chicken to look at what you want it to look at. We also found a conversation about it with the creator,[MrPennywhistle] in some reddit comments.

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Automated Chicken Coop Door Is Solar-powered

November 27, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Fileark] has been busy with the hacks lately. This time around he’s built a solar-powered chicken coop door that opens in the morning, and closes at night. A single motor slides the door open and closed using a loop of spring-loaded string. There are limiting switches on either side of the door jamb to ensure proper positioning. The grey box seen above houses the hardware; a regulator for the solar panels perched atop the roof line, a battery from a broken UPS, and the driver board itself. An AVR chip running the Arduino bootloader monitors a phototransistor to detect sunup and sundown, driving the door motor appropriately using a pair of relays.

Check out the demonstration and hardware overview after the break. [Fileark] was inspired to build his after seeing the alarm-clock coop door. We don’t know if he got a chance to look at the vertical coop door, but we think his less mechanically-complicated solution is just as elegant.

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Alarm Clock Learns New Trick, Opening Doors

September 1, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 21 Comments

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]