Smart enclosure

October, 2016

Presentation

The idea of making a smart enclosure for chicken came to my mind thanks to my parents house. The problematic is, to prevent the chikens to be eaten by foxes, we had to close the coop each evenning and open it each morning no matter the season and the weather... I thought it would be nice if it was automatic :).
So here is the idea. The PCB has different module:

• Light sensor
• RF module
• DC motors
• IR barrier

The light sensor is here to detect the sunrise and the sunset. If a sunrise is detected (for example), it will activate the motors, so the door can be open.
The chicken could go out of the enclosure and enjoy their day. When they step out, they are detected by the IR barrier, which can count them.
Informations such as the current state of the door or motor, and the number of chicken count, can be send via the RF module, and transmit to a receiver, which is inside the house.

Here is the main idea of this project, let's see how I did it.

Making the PCB

I have designed the PCB with Altium. The PCB was then printed at my school.
After, I had to make the hole, solder all vias and components.
Given that I made it at school, I made all my test there, with all the necessary equipement (oscillscope, multimeter etc)

Here some pictures of the production:

Video

Here is a short video presenting the schematics and PCB of the board in Altium:

The concept was working, I made a video on my YT channel to demonstrate the system. Unfortunately, the video is not really good(I was younger then ^^), that why I don't post it on my website.