Automate Your Poultry With CoopCommand

May 8, 2021 by Jenny List 24 Comments

A fresh egg taken from beneath a slumbering hen is something to which the taste of a supermarket equivalent rarely compares. The satisfaction of having a contented flock does come at a price though, in the form of constant monitoring and husbandry of your poultry’s well-being. It’s a problem that [hms-11] has tried to address with CoopCommand, a system to automate the monitoring of and environment within a chicken coop. It controls a light to counteract for shorter winter days, warms their water when it’s cold, has a fan for cooling and ventilation on hot days, and a camera to keep any eye on them.

At its heart is an ATmega328 controlling the coop functions, and an ESP32 camera board for network connectivity and visual monitoring. An alphanumeric LCD and a set or buttons provide the interface, and all is fitted on a custom PCB in a smart 3D-printed housing. Meanwhile all the files can be found in a GitHub repository.

A machine cannot replace human care and attention when it comes to good animal husbandry, as there’s always an essential need for the poultry owner to attend to the needs of their charges. But a system like this one can make an important contribution to their welfare, with a consequent increase in their laying ability.

Classical Poultry Conditioning Is A Bird-Brained Scheme

October 9, 2020 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

A while back, [Kutluhan Aktar] was trying to hack their chickens, quails, and ducks for higher egg production and faster hatching times by using a bit of classical conditioning. That is, feeding them at the same time every day while simultaneously exposing them to sound and light. Once [Kutluhan] slipped enough times, they hatched a plan to build an automatic feeder.

This fun rooster-shaped bird feeder runs on an Arduino Nano and gets its time, date, and temperature info from a DS3231 RTC. All [Kutluhan] has to do is set the daily feeding time. When it comes, a pair of servos and a pan-tilt kit work together to invert a Pringles can filled with food pellets. A piezo buzzer and a green LED provide the sound and light to help with conditioning. Scratch your way past the break to see it in action.

If [Kutluhan] gets tired of watching the birds eat at the same time every day, perhaps a trash-for-treats training program could be next on the list.

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Human-Powered Henhouse Keeps Chickens On The Job

September 1, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 37 Comments

While it’s not exactly in the same vein as other projects around here, like restoring vintage video game systems or tricking an ESP32 to output VGA, keeping chickens can also be a rewarding hobby. They make decent pets and can also provide you with eggs. You can also keep them on a surprisingly small amount of land, but if you have a larger farm you can use them to help condition the soil all over your property. For that you’ll need a mobile henhouse, and as [AtomicZombie] shows, they don’t all have to be towed by a tractor.

This henhouse is human-powered, meaning any regular human can lift it up and scoot it around to different areas without help from heavy equipment. It uses a set of bicycle wheels which rotate around to lift up the frame of the house. A steering wheel in the back allows it to be guided anywhere and then set down. It also has anti-digging protection, which is a must-have for any henhouse to keep the foxes out.

We like this one for its simplicity and ease-of-use. Not needing a tractor on a small farm can be a major cost savings, but if you really need one, [AtomicZombie] also designed a robust all-electric tractor-like device that we featured a little while back.

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Irising Chicken Coop Door

July 15, 2017 by Rich Hawkes 26 Comments

What’s cooler than a door that irises open and closed? Not much. They add a nice science-fictiony detail to any entryway. [Zposner]’s dad wanted an automatic door for his chicken coop, so [zposner] took some time and came up with a nice door for him with an iris mechanism. You’ll need to watch the video.

[Zposner] used a combination of laser cutting and a CNC router to cut the pieces, then sanded and painted the wood. After assembly, [zposner] started work on the control mechanism. He’s controlling the door with an Arduino and a motor shield; to let the Arduino know to stop the motor, [zposner] used limit switches which get hit as the mechanism rotates. Once the switches were in the right place and the code written, it was time to finish assembly and install the door on the coop. To keep the Arduino that safe, it was installed in a plastic container with a screw lid, and then hot-glued to beside the iris.

Unfortunately, chickens don’t necessarily care how cool something is, and in this case, they didn’t realize that the iris was a door – they refused to exit the coop through it. [Zposner] tried a few things before settling on putting the chicken on the edge of the door – then the chicken would realize that it could go through it.

[Zposner]’s dad now has a snazzy door that opens with a switch. It was a great project for [zposner] and his dad to work on and, even if the chickens seem unimpressed, they did a great job. Check out the iris porthole that a Detroit Hackerspace built into its door, or, if you really want to build an iris mechanism, but don’t have access to a CNC router, a laser cutter, or, you know, wood, you could build this out of bits you have lying around.

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Automated Judging Of Hackaday Prize Entries

August 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

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We have some of the Internet’s hacking elite judging The Hackaday Prize, and that means they can’t enter any projects into the prize. All the better for everyone else, we suppose. One of the judges, [Sprite_tm], is a resourceful guy and when it comes to judging the entries for The Hackaday Prize, he’s going to do what comes naturally to him: build a machine to automate the task.

[Sprite]’s plan for the JudgeTron 9001 is to use neural networks embedded in biological specimens to do the judging for him. Honestly, we really appreciate the effort he put in to this; biohacking is really in vogue right now, and we do love the classic throwback to the AI renaissance here. It certainly doesn’t hurt that he’s using a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino for this project, either.

Grabbing a touchscreen LCD and a few other parts out of his junk drawer, [Sprite] quickly whipped up a project that would display entries to The Hackaday Prize to the biologically embedded neural nets. These nets needed a little bit of encouragement to select winning entries, so a ‘feed’ back mechanism was laser cut out of acrylic, mounted to a servo, and filled with positive reinforcement.

The software running on the Pi crawls through the list of entries to The Hackaday Prize, extracting images from each one. The plan was for the biological neural nets to select winning entries and be rewarded via the feedback mechanism. These neural nets proved to be very sensitive to the sound of the servo gears of the feedback mechanism, and [Sprite]’s attempt at finding a winning entry with his creation has so far proved unsuccessful. Still, there’s a video of it in action, you can check that out below.

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