For a bit of fun and because we can, back in 2013, my children and I decided to build a fully autonomous Chicken House Controller, to control our Monmouth Major hen-house that house up to 20 hens. It sits on a custom perspex lined base which gives some extra shelter and the all-important dry dust-bath area. Its purpose is to keep the hens safe by automating common activities such as letting them in and out at the right times and to inspire the children to learn about problem solving and gain experience in areas such as woodwork, mechanical and electromechanical engineering, electronics and computing.
This web site details the journey we have been on, from its humble beginning, up to what it has evolved into today, more than a decade later.
The project has not had constant development, it has had times when its under active development and other times when its just sitting there, doing its job, hence why the web site has been quiet for a number of years.
During 2022, it became apparent that the existing electronics needed to be refreshed, having provided 9 years of service, since it was starting to suffer a number of different age related problems and the necessary repairs were not simple, such as the seal on the main box housing the electronics as the case had distorted a bit, this meant that moisture and red mites could get in and some of the electronics was showing signs of corrosion. The coop also required some maintenance, in addition to the regular spring deep clean, it also needed more wood preservative and the roof was starting to leak and thus needed replacement.
In order to facilitate a full deep clean and re-application of wood preservative, to try and better control the mites in the summer, all the electronics needed to be removed. This gives a perfect opportunity to re-imagine the system and perform long outstanding upgrades such as building proper PCB's and enhancing the platforms capabilities.
The web site has now been split into different sections, allowing you to see the different iterations of the system, they can be seen from the top menu, under "Construction", or the links below can be used to go to important milestones.
The 2022 version 2 platform and its ongoing development.
The 2013 section covers the initial version 1 platform prototype, which has now been decommissioned. However, much of the functionality and code is still present in the later version along with much of the logic around how the systems functions.
Alternately, as all pages are in chronological order, you can browse through the time line using the next and previous buttons at the bottom of each page.