Automatic Chicken Door Opener Eglu Cube

thingiverse

I live in Minnesota and when i bought the eglu cube they didnt have the automatic door add-on available yet. It finally came out but its winter and there is no way im taking half the cube apart to install that... I bought an automatic door opener from a company named hentronix. It was expensive but actually worked pretty well. That is until it got -10f and the battery just couldn't handle the weather. The gear also slipped and they told me i had to buy another one. I thought about how easy it would be for me to make my own. I am a software developer and I know that the components and design to open a door based on light levels is not too hard at-least in concept. Anyway rambling aside. I spent about two weeks and I have Version 1 of a diy automatic chicken coop door opener and its open source for everyone. You can easily adapt this to work with different kinds of doors (sliding panels) etc with some basic changes. Its designed to close the door at ~19 lux and open at 50 lux. Here is the project site for the code: https://github.com/blake-haas/ArduinoChickenDoor