I have no qualms with the merit of an automatic chicken coop door. Obviously the benefits can be considerable, and the project certainly fits the bill.
The point is, almost all maker projects jump straight to let's throw an Arduino at it, with no consideration to the tradeoffs at all. This can be quite a disservice.
There are tradeoffs, eg. power management? (those batteries aren't going to last at all), fault tolerance? (arduino crashes due to condensation shorting out the timing crystal), maintenance? can you instruct an untrained individual to perform any meaningful repair work (eg. bend the arm on a damaged limit switch).
One benefit IOT can bring, is the detection of fault conditions etc (door took too long to open fully something stuck in the tracks), but implementing that kind of handling in a meaningful way is a complex problem.
These things rarely matter for a diy project, but you see this stuff everywhere. Consider whether a problem can be solved in an analog or mechanical manner, it's likely to lead to a simpler and more robust solution.
As for ensuring chickens are inside of a coop, that's a tough problem and I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that?
Eg. for the above chicken in coup problem, something as simple as a weight triggered switch on the ramp (or a push bar near the coop opening) is likely to out perform anything more complex.
My thoughts are definitely too complex. Currently I'm thinking of a camera that will turn on a light and take a picture (at a specified time || when door closes) and send that to our family Slack - someone will habitually look at any notification, and we don't have a large number of chickens so it's fastest to rely on human perception to see if someone is missing. Or just a camera that we can turn on remotely to check the feed ourselves.
That's the "simple" version - a more complex one would take a picture and compare to an empty sample to decide how many blobs there are, but that is hampered by (1) If chickens huddle, that becomes complex and (2) it's not a problem space I have any interest in, so the problems won't be fun to solve.
The point is, almost all maker projects jump straight to let's throw an Arduino at it, with no consideration to the tradeoffs at all. This can be quite a disservice.
There are tradeoffs, eg. power management? (those batteries aren't going to last at all), fault tolerance? (arduino crashes due to condensation shorting out the timing crystal), maintenance? can you instruct an untrained individual to perform any meaningful repair work (eg. bend the arm on a damaged limit switch).
One benefit IOT can bring, is the detection of fault conditions etc (door took too long to open fully something stuck in the tracks), but implementing that kind of handling in a meaningful way is a complex problem.
These things rarely matter for a diy project, but you see this stuff everywhere. Consider whether a problem can be solved in an analog or mechanical manner, it's likely to lead to a simpler and more robust solution.
As for ensuring chickens are inside of a coop, that's a tough problem and I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that?
Eg. for the above chicken in coup problem, something as simple as a weight triggered switch on the ramp (or a push bar near the coop opening) is likely to out perform anything more complex.