My chickens on TTN

Use Cases
1

Greetings,
I’d like to introduce my hen house project, a solar-powered hen house controller with LoraWan connectivity.

Key features are:

  • Runs on an Adafruit Feather 32u4 board (ATmega32u4) equiped with a LoRa Radio Module
  • Entrance guillotine-style door is motorized. Two reed end-switches detect the door open/close positions
  • UP/DOWN interface buttons to manually force door opening/closing
  • Door automatically opens/closes at sunrise and sunset (function of an ambient light threshold)
  • Measures individual temperatures in 4 nesting boxes (aim is to detect when a new egg was layed) + computes an average
  • Runs on a 3.7V 4400mAh Lithium Ion Battery Pack and a 6V, 1W solar panel
  • Goes to DeepSleep until UP/DOWN buttons are pressed
  • Broadcasts every few minutes the systems’ metrics (temperatures, ambient light level, door position, battery level and charging status), received by home automation system in JSON format via MQTT broker

HenHouse schematics HenHouseView P_1HenHouseElec1 HenHouseMotorizedDoor

11 Likes
2

Magnificent, make sure to paint it all or the chip-board will de-laminate though :wink:

3

Thx @hmilson
Wife and kids wanted to keep the raw color so I varnished it :wink:

4

Super cool :wink:

1 Like
5

LoRa Chicks. :rooster: :rooster: :grin:

2 Likes
6

Greetings,
Happy to say I have ported that project to the Adafruit Feather M0 board (ATSAMD21G18 ARM Cortex M0 processor) and LMIC library.
Previous version was based on the SAMD 32U4 processor board and TinyLora library with ABP activation. The need to migrate to TTN V3 was the motivator!

5 Likes