Raspberry Pi3 Chicken Coop Door

[Mr. Barred Rock]

Anyone still messing with the Raspberry Pi for automating a coop door. I don't really see much going on with it been working on building one. Just wondering if there was any interest in the topic or if maybe it turned out to be a problem long term.

 

[tsperry88]

I have developed one based on the Arduino. I'll offer them to anybody who is interested once I am satisfied. The Rasberry is much less resilient to a harsh environment and power loss. It provides more remote capabilities, but I have to fix enough things in my real job, I wanted me coop to be as reliable as possible.

I designed it to handle lighting as well. In my coop it slowly brightens the lights 30 minutes after sunrise and slowly dims them 30 minutes before sunset. I also added a paremeter in the program to set the number of hours of lighting, for those who use artificial lighting for egg production. Because the lights dim over a set period of time, it doesn't plunge the birds into darkness.

 

[aart]

@jthornton

 

[jthornton]

Interesting, how are you dimming the lights and what type of light are you using?

JT

 

[Sahraschweiss]

Following

 

[jthornton]

Anyone still messing with the Raspberry Pi for automating a coop door. I don't really see much going on with it been working on building one. Just wondering if there was any interest in the topic or if maybe it turned out to be a problem long term.

Both my coops are controlled by Raspberry Pi 3's. Coop Uno just has the Rpi and relay board. Coup Deux has a Rpi with the 7" touch screen as well as a 1 wire thermocouple for coop temperature and a set of USB speakers for me and the chickens to listen to music all day.

My programs are constantly evolving in Coop Deux... I have my instructions for setting up the Rpi, the Lite OS is the best.

Add your location to your profile, you can never tell we might be neighbors...

JT

 

[jthornton]

Following

Check out the Missouri thread, it's pretty active.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/calling-any-one-from-missouri.73271/page-1325#post-23018839

JT

 

[tsperry88]

Interesting, how are you dimming the lights and what type of light are you using?

JT

I use PWM. There is a mosfet on the board, with a gate resistor and a pull down resistor to keep the output from ever floating.

It can drive any dimmable LED at 12v. My board can do about 3a continuous, which is a lot of LEDs. I use these the LEDs below since they can be daisy chained with a solder bridge. I used the minimal amount of them to light my coup, to give me the least amount of output at their dimmest. I also like the color. I hate bright white LEDs.


https://www.ledsupply.com/leds/12v-led-light-nichia-757


On my first prototype, I used a PWM to AC dimmer and it could control regular 120v AC lighting. I tried to keep the final product as simple as possible with the least to fail.

 

[jthornton]

I also like the color. I hate bright white LEDs.

Which color did you get?

JT

 

[tsperry88]

3000k. It's close to the color of incadesant bulbs. I may have even liked 2700k better. That's what I use in my home.