The lab

Chicken door controller

The chickens needed letting out in the morning and shutting in at night, and I did not want to be the mechanism. A Raspberry Pi, a motor and a scheduler handle it, and a Telegram bot handles me — open, close, status, or a photo of the coop.

Discipline
Hardware & Firmware
Year
2023
Stack
Raspberry Pi · Python · Telegram bot

Dawn is early in June. The chickens did not care that I had opinions about this.

A Raspberry Pi drives the door on a schedule — open at 06:00, closed at 19:00 by default — and I control it from a Telegram bot: open, close, stop, status, change the schedule, or ask it for a photo of the coop. It runs as a systemd unit so a power cut doesn't leave the birds shut in.

There was a small Flask app at first. The Telegram bot replaced it within a month, because the interface I actually wanted was my phone, from anywhere, without a VPN.

Tracking real sunrise would be better than a fixed schedule and is the obvious next change. Three years on I still haven't made it. In midsummer the door opens over an hour after first light and shuts more than two hours before dusk, and the chickens have not complained.

Open to interesting problems

Got something
that needs building?

hello@louisreed.co.uk