Ultimate Chicken House - Phase II - introduction
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I am pleased to announce the completion of phase II of the ultimate chicken house project. This comprises a digital timer to delay opening the chicken house door, an automatic feed dispenser to deliver grain/pellet feed at specified times and some indoor lights to make it easier to see if the chickens are in the house at night. It is based around a PIC microcontoller...
Keywords: chicken coop coup house home automation electronic automatic door opener gate hatch automatic light sensitive feeder hopper grain pellet photosensitive PIC digital timer motor lighting
The remainder of this page includes a description of the development history of this phase of the project and follows on from Phase I. If you wish to proceed direct to the detailed instructions you can go to building the hopper & feeding mechanism, electronic circuit design, software design, the final product or see one of the related tutorials, PIC programming on the cheap - a beginner's guide, making a printed circuit board (PCB).
Without any real prior experience of electronics I set out to discover how to interface a timer with the VSB unit. I managed to find a cheap digital mains timer on ebay which I took apart and extracted the timing device. At first this seemed great as it operated at 3V, had a neat LCD display and was fully programmable via several buttons. It had a backup battery of 1.3V which was meant to last for more than 2 years. There were 4 wires from the PCB to the timer unit and one of them went high when the timer was on and via transistor and relay put the mains power on. The problem was it had a refractory period of 1 minute (i.e. it could only change state less frequently than 1 minute) and would only be able to control one device.
By this point I had decided to add an automated feeder after coming across these dog and chicken feeders. For a different design the extracted timer would have been ideal and it may find some future use. I now hoped to find a cheap pet feeder on ebay but none seemed appropriate for the volume and frequency of feed so I abandoned the idea of a hack in favour of building from scratch.
When I discovered microcontrollers I was amazed at how cheap and flexible they were. It's a rather daunting prospect though given the huge array of brands and types how to get started. I have summarised my thoughts in an article 'PIC programming on the cheap - a beginner's guide' and this explains why I decided to go straight for the PIC microcontollers from Microchip.
So, the project aims were as follows:
1) To be able to interface with the VSB unit to delay door opening until a specified time
2) To dispense a measured amount of chicken feed (grain or layers pellets) at certain times of day
3) To make the project as cheap as possible
4) To make the project simple and reproducable
5) To be able to run the system for at least 2 weeks on a single set of battery cells
As I have explained, this is a project designed and constructed without any specialist knowledge of electronics or mechanics/robotics. Information has been gathered from the internet and some books. The design has many inadequecies which I would be pleased for people to point out. I hope to incorporate any suggestions for improvement in to a future version.
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