Automatic chicken coop door powered by arduino
As Farm Hackers Louis, RJ and Ben work on the Wireless Greenhouse Monitor project, which is powered by an open-source Arduino circuit board, we have come across yet another great use for the Arduino on the farm:
Check out this Instructable for an programmable, self-locking chicken coop door, whose Arduino microcontroller tells the unit under what conditions to open and close the coop. It’s just one of many possibilities for open source electronics project on the farm.
Washing Machine to Chicken Plucker for ~$130
by Luke Deikis of Quincy Farm
You need:
A washing machine (from your mom, Craigslist, the dump, etc)
A disc (like you’d buy for a disc harrow)
About 100 chicken plucker fingers (available from the Whizbang guy)
Some small scraps of steel, including a 2” long scrap of pipe that’s the perfect size
An allen-head set screw and matching nut
A waterproof switch and housing
A drill bit and drill, some paint, etc
A racket ball or similar
A welder
An oxy-acetyl torch or mean drill press
About one full, well-prepared day
FarmHack: Poultry Housing Options
The growing season is full-fledged and you may be considering raising some fledglings of your own. Check out these housing options for small-scale chicken raising from around the web. Feel free to comment and post ideas of your own – we’ll be sure to include them!
 the Morris Farm |
For Pastured Poultry, try this Greenhouse style pen used by Morris Farm. |
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The infamous chicken tractor: here is a series of videos on how to build one from Garden Girl TV. |
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 from Tangled Nest |
This chicken coop featured on Tangled Nest makes the most of space in a backyard. |
 from Greenterrafirma.com |
This coop featured on greenterrafirma.com includes easy access doors. |
 from La Finca NY |
This hutch built at La Finca NY used the frame off an old porch swing and other leftover materials to start. |
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*BONUS* Recommended Reading: The ATTRA guide to Range Poultry Housing. |
The Poultry Feeder Challenge
At some recent FarmHack workshops, participants shared great ideas for building affordable waterers + feeders for poultry.
Share your farm-made waterers and feeders with FarmHack! Link in the comments or write us at FarmHack and we’ll help you put up a post here about yours.
To help inspire you, we are fortunate that several have been well documented on the web, so here are links to a few:
 from Backwoods Home Magazine |
Here’s an under-five-dollar, 5-gallon bucket feeder from Backwoods Home Magazine |
 from BackYardChickens.com |
and a 5-gallon bucket waterer from BackYardChickens.com |
 from BackYardChickens.com |
this DIY chicken feeder only opens when a chicken stands on it, to keep wild birds from feasting. The how-to, complete with plans drawn on graph paper, is here. |
| and Here’s video of a chicken eating at a similar self-opening feeder, from BackYardChickens.com | |
 from BackYardChickens.com |
Here’s a slightly more deluxe, but still dirt cheap, nipple waterer, with instructions and parts list. |
 from BackYardChickens.com |
And as long as we’re getting fancy, here’s a fully automated feeder with DIY electronics. |
But who wants to buy the electronic controller for that last one when you could follow Make Magazine’s lead, and re-purpose an old VCR to meter out the food? Here’s the ingenious inspiration for that. First farmer to build a VCR-based poultry feeder gets the FarmHack prize for invention of the week:
