Christian Wolpert's automatic chicken coop door opener and closer is the second one I've seen so far that is completely off the grid and designed to work on a battery that gets charged with a solar panel.

It uses an MSP430 microcontroller as the brain along with a customized Linux source code that Christian is kindly offering as a free download.

I know building and programming your own microcontroller can sound advanced, but Christian describes a clever short cut where he makes use of a tutorial as his starting point. This trick reduces most of the number crunching work to a process of adjusting specific interrupt routines to fit your automatic coop opening needs.






Edited to add:

After years of research, Mark eventually settled on this automatic chicken door.

You can see a summary of the best chicken door alternatives and why he chose this version here.

If you're planning on automating your coop, don't forget to pick up one of our chicken waterers.  They never spill or fill with poop, and if done right, can only need filling every few days or weeks!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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