Chicken coop door circuit

So I’ve been updating my chicken coop lately. See here for one such recent upgrade:

Upgraded coop lighting

I finally got around to upgrading the lighting in my chicken coop.

The latest upgrade is a two-fer design…

Door State Indication

I want to be able to tell, from a distance, that the door is either open or closed. This is both a convenience to the chicken ranchers and a safety feature. It would be nice to more easily answer the questions, “did I close the coop already?” or “hey kids, did you let the chickens out?”

A door indicator that I have in mind will be a large bright LED signal of sorts. I found really nifty LED matrix panels that have — in this case — a grid of 8 rows of 8 columns of “smart” LEDs. They are little SPI bus enabled display chips. So therefore, each single LED in the grid is addressable, i.e. with a computer or programmable device, I can command them individually to light up to any color or brightness I want. Pretty cool!

The software for figuring out how to make cohesive “images” or shapes is fairly complex, and I’ll cover that in more detail in a late post. For now, here is my napkin sketch for addressing pixels:

So anyway, it’s possible with the same display grid to show multiple types of signals in the same grid, such as:

closed at night, tucked in all safe

blinking red when opening to the predator-filled dangerous world

Automated Door

A long time project I’ve wanted to tackle is an automated door. This portion of the project (call it phase 2) is a bit more involved with software, but I’m putting in the hooks now to be able to do this later. It will require a motor driver with an H-bridge circuit, a +12V supply, and various cabling.

Here is my progress so far. Package remains a hard hurdle for me to cross, both mentally and practically.

So far, Phase 1 is going pretty well. I’m nearing the software finalization stage and testing prototype in the coop. More to come!