Weekend projects: Chicken Squisher 3000

Really enjoyed this write up, good level of detail. Also what an excellent product name!

That's a really nice coop. I don't have to deal with anything bigger than raccoons or possums so my coop is pretty basic: built from a leftover grain bin.

But this is a nice reminder that I've been meaning to automate the door. It gets dark earlier than I expect and so far I've been lucky that the raccoon that was showing up at dusk and climbing into the run has taken a hiatus for now.

Have a couple car window actuators. Just need to remember to pick up some solar cells from Amazon since it's too far from the house to run power.

> That's a really nice coop.

I've stayed in houses that were less nice than this coop!

Love this. My brother’s chickens like to try to sleep in the trees at night. Guess we’ll have to put together the Chicken Fetcher 3000 :)

+1 to this comment! This is a cool build and I loved the details in the write up.

Does the product live up to its name? By which I mean, how often will chickens get squished (or more likely, maimed) because they fail to get out of the way of the door as it closes?

Power windows in cars often come with automatic reversal mechanisms, which are designed to detect obstructions and prevent the window from closing on them. I don't see mention of such a safety feature here, though.

Maybe making the Chicken Squisher 3000™ close very slowly would reduce the likelihood of a squish event? In the video, it's not like the door slams shut, but it's not slow.

Or maybe chickens, dumb as they are, have quick enough reaction speed that the danger of squishing is negligible.

This is a glorious project! I appreciate the commentary on how modern components simplified the build.

As a chicken enthusiast and chronic over-builder, I'd love a tour of that coup and its features!

I was curious about this as well. He mentioned using a slow speed in mid-span and ramping up at the end, but without some safety a grizzly accident is possible.

Chickens are dumb, but they still have plenty of natural reactions. If you throw something at them, they don't just "take it", they'll try to dodge. I imagine this speed is absolutely sufficient.

That being said, if this is a problem, you could just switch to ducks. As my rancher friend often says "ducks are much better at not-dying."

I appreciate the author's choice to use Vimeo instead of YouTube for the video. It's not much, but I like the little piece of resistance to the Video Hegemon

As someone who grew up on a farm.... I think this is what your nieces and/or nephews are for xD

Need to add peck-to-enter codes to the door to prevent the chickens from getting locked out if they get home late :)

Yeah, agree. My concern would be a chicken sticking it's head through the gap to take a peek as its closing, and getting stuck.

I think the OP may have mitigation (or at least the possibility to mitigate).

This looks like an open-loop system (eg, the MCU doesn't know where in the swing the motor is), which makes it a bit more difficult. But it looks like they have limit switches.

Not quite sure how it determines the point to go to 100% power, but I assume it's a timing thing. I can't think of a good way to determine the difference between "chicken neck stuck in door" vs "snow / ice preventing door from closing" without some sort of position feedback.

I suppose you could have a timeout -- it gets 3 seconds at high power, and if it hasn't triggered the door close limit switch, it opens completely, then tries again. This would probably be ok, as long as 100% power doesn't decapitate the chicken...

Hm. My ducks (Indian runners) weren't, between eagles and raccoons gunning for them.

Do the chicken go back in to sleep before dusk?

Do the predators never attack during the day?

> Do the chicken go back in to sleep before dusk?

Yes - they are remarkably consistent in following the sun. Most automated doors wait until well past dusk, after which all the birds are up.

> Do the predators never attack during the day?

Raccoons and hawks are the predators I have had to worry about the most. Of them, raccoons are primarily nocturnal, and hawks are best dealt with by having plenty of covered spaces in your run and a rooster to watch the skies.

Great project! If you don't feel like building your own chicken squisher, there are commercially-available automatic coop doors that you can buy on Amazon. The one I got is Tuya-based, making it easy to integrate into Home Assistant.

Five days after installing it (and thus enabling the chickens to access the outer yard) they were carried away by predators. The 8ft+ wire yard fence didn't extend far enough into the ground to prevent something from tunneling under it.

I had a neighbor a few doors down who ended up pouring a concrete slab for their coop because rats were tunneling in to the coop. He ended up sinking 12" of stainless mesh into the ground around the slab to stop the rats. The rats also did $15K damage to his crawl space and a few thousand dollars damage to that of a directly next-door neighbor. The torches and pitchforks soon came out because the suburban chickens experiment caused the whole neighborhood to become overwhelmed with rats.

This was back in COVID times and the exterminators said the infestation was made much more severe than normal because all the restaurants in the area were closed down and the usual rat food sources disappeared forcing the rats out into the residential neighborhoods. Some of the rats never left and, even today, we are still having to trap them.

Fun times.

Is that why it doesn't work?

IME ducks don't go into the coop at dusk so they will get trapped on the wrong side.

Most ducks lack the roosting instinct that chickens have. Apparently Muscovy ducks are a notable exception, they'll roost in coops, on roofs, and in trees like chickens do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscovy_duck#/media/File:Musco...

With the understanding that DIY is great, and this is a super-cool project, etc, we've used this [1] commercial door opener from Omlet (chuckle) with great results. Can be set to open/close at specific times, or manually, or after light/dark with programmed delay. No decapitations so far; auto-opens if there's resistance to opening above a mild threshold. Wifi connected if desired.

[1] https://www.omlet.us/shop/chicken_keeping/automatic_chicken_...