Working Chicken Door!

Noel has spent even more quality time at the electronics bench, and made some modifications to the door setup, and now we have a chicken door that will automatically go up and down via a web interface on our home network. A bit more programming, and we will have it automatically know when sunrise and sunset are, and it will open and close accordingly. Which means we can stay out late and not worry about getting the chickens closed in, and we can go on vacations and not have to have a chicken sitter come in twice a day. Good stuff.

Anyway, yesterday evening Noel installed the door, gave it a test run, and then we had to go out.

When we got home well after dark, the chickens had figured out how to get in their room by hopping in through the little door, and were up in their roost. This morning Noel made a couple adjustments and we gave it a little test:

The girls seemed to like it, and Carole even gave it a test run.

The door still makes a lot of noise and there are more adjustments to be made, but we're now able to open and close it from inside the house.

The odd thing is that the chickens have spent more time inside their room today than they usually do. I guess they like the room a little darker and less well ventilated.

And in other chicken-related news, three more chicks will be coming sometime about a month from now. Plus three for our neighbors that we will be brooding for them, so we'll have quite the little chickie entourage very soon now. My master plan is to have a chicken in every back yard on our block by 2015 (actually, no, but that would be pretty funny).

Technorati Tags: automation, chickens, urban farming

posted by ayse on 05/20/09