How A DIY Chicken Coop Door Opener Went From Simple To Complex

June 13, 2025 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

How hard could it be to make a chicken coop door that can be configured to open and close automatically using a straightforward interface? That’s the question that [Jeff Sandberg] set out with, after three years of using a more basic off-the-shelf unit that offered no remote access nor a convenient user interface. The use case for [Jeff] was rather straightforward: the door would be open during the day and closed at night to keep the hens safely inside the coop.

The commercial solution offered an RTC-backed programmable interface as well as a light sensor, but the latter wasn’t always reliable in inclement weather and making simple changes to the programming when e.g. the hens had to stay inside a day due to work on the yard, was much more complicated than needed, plus had to be done on the spot. The new system would solve all these ills.

That said, the existing door mechanism was doing a fine job and could be kept. This just left making a new box with electronics to control it, starting with an ESP32C3 with the ESPHome firmware that is hooked into the local Home Assistant system, along with a motor to lift and lower the door and with magnetic contact sensors.

So far so easy. The hard part came with the installation, which involved trenching to the hen house for mains power, repairing the damage from this, and troubleshooting a power issue that turned out to be due to a dodgy power adapter. The payoff is that now the chicken coop is also part of the smart home and their owner never has to trudge through a soggy garden again to adjust the programming on a dim LC display with far too few buttons.

2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Fort Bawks Is Guarded By Object Detection

June 9, 2025 by Tyler August 5 Comments

One of the difficult things about raising chickens is that you aren’t the only thing that finds them tasty. Foxes, raccoons, hawks — if it can eat meat, it probably wants a bite of your flock. [donutsorelse] wanted to protect his flock and to be able to know when predators were about without staying up all night next to the hen-house. What to do but outsource the role of Chicken Guardian to a Raspberry pi?

Object detection is done using a YOLOv8 model trained on images of the various predators local to [donutorelse]. The model is running on a Raspberry Pi and getting images from a standard webcam. Since the webcam has no low-light capability, the system also has a motion-activated light that’s arguably goes a long way towards spooking predators away itself. To help with the spooking, a speaker module plays specific sound files for each detected predator — presumably different sounds might work better at scaring off different predators.

If that doesn’t work, the system phones home to activate a siren inside [donutorelse]’s house, using a Blues Wireless Notecarrier F as a cellular USB modem. The siren is just a dumb unit; activation is handled via a TP-Link smart plug that’s hooked into [donutorelse]’s custom smart home setup. Presumably the siren cues [donutorelse] to take action against the predator assault on the chickens.

Weirdly enough, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an AI-enabled chicken coop, but it is the first one to make into our ongoing challenge, which incidentally wraps up today.

Presence Detection Augments 1930s Home

April 18, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

It can be jarring to see various sensors, smart switches, cameras, and other technology in a house built in the 1930s, like [Chris]’s was. But he still wanted presence detection so as to not stub any toes in the dark. The result is a sensor that blends in with the home’s aesthetics a bit better than anything you’re likely to find at the Big Box electronics store.

For the presence detection sensors, [Chris] chose to go with 24 GHz mmwave radar modules that, unlike infrared sensors, can detect if a human is in an area even if they are incredibly still. Paired with the diminutive ESP32-S2 Mini, each pair takes up very little real estate on a wall.

Although he doesn’t have a 3D printer to really pare down the size of the enclosure to the maximum, he found pre-made enclosures instead that are fairly inconspicuous on the wall. Another design goal here was to make sure that everything was powered so he wouldn’t have to perpetually change batteries, so a small wire leads from the prototype unit as well.

The radar module and ESP pair are set up with some code to get them running in Home Assistant, which [Chris] has provided on the project’s page. With everything up and running he has a module that can control lights without completely changing the aesthetic or behavior of his home. If you’re still using other presence sensors and are new to millimeter wave radar, take a look at this project for a good guide on getting started with this fairly new technology.

E-Ink Screen Combined With Analog Dial Is Epic Win

November 25, 2024 by Lewin Day 52 Comments

Analog dials used to be a pretty common way of displaying information on test equipment and in industrial applications. They fell out of favor as more advanced display technologies became cheaper. However, if you combine an analog dial with a modern e-ink display, it turns out you get something truly fantastic indeed.

This build comes to us from [Arne]. The concept is simple—get an e-ink display, and draw a dial on it using whatever graphics and scale you choose. Then, put it behind a traditional coil-driven analog dial in place of the more traditional paper scale. Now, you have an analog dial that can display any quantity you desire. Just update the screen to display a different scale as needed. Meanwhile, if you don’t need to change the display, the e-ink display will draw zero power and still display the same thing.

[Arne] explains how it all works in the writeup. It’s basically a LilyGo T5 ESP32 board with an e-ink screen attached, and it’s combined with a MF-110A multimeter. It’s super easy to buy that stuff and start tinkering with the concept yourself. [Arne] uses it with Home Assistant, which is as good an idea as any.

You get all the benefits of a redrawable display, with the wonderful visual tactility of a real analog dial. It’s a build that smashes old and new together in the best way possible. It doesn’t heart that [Arne] chose a great retro font for the dial, either. Applause all around!

The Future Looks Bleak For Alexa Skill Development

April 12, 2024 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

While the average Hackaday reader is arguably less likely than most to install a megacorp’s listening device in their home, we know there’s at least some of you out there that have an Amazon hockey puck or two sitting on a shelf. The fact is, they offer some compelling possibilities for DIY automation, even if you do have to jump through a few uncomfortable hoops to bend them to your will.

That being said, we’re willing to bet very few readers have bothered installing more than a few Alexa Skills. But that’s not a judgment based on any kind of nerd stereotype — it’s just that nobody seems to care about them. A fact that’s evidenced by the recent revelation that even Amazon looks to be losing interest in the program. In a post on LinkedIn, Skill developer [Mark Tucker] shared an email he received from the mothership explaining they were ending the AWS Promotional Credits for Alexa (APCA) program on June 30th.

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Screenshot of eBay listings with Gigaset IoT devices being sold, now basically useless

A Giga-Sunset For Gigaset IoT Devices

April 3, 2024 by Arya Voronova 76 Comments

In today’s “predictable things that happened before and definitely will happen again”, we have another company in the “smart device” business that has just shuttered their servers, leaving devices completely inert. This time, it’s Gigaset. The servers were shuttered on the 29th of March, and the official announcement (German, Google Translate) states that there’s no easy way out.

It appears that the devices were locked into Gigaset Cloud to perform their function, with no local-only option. This leaves all open source integrations in the dust, whatever documentation there was, is now taken down. As the announcement states, Gigaset Communications Gmbh has gotten acquired due to insolvency, and the buyer was not remotely interested in the Smart Home portion of the business. As the corporate traditions follow, we can’t expect open sourcing of the code or protocol specification or anything of the sort — the devices are bricks until someone takes care of them.

If you’re looking for smart devices on the cheap, you might want to add “Gigaset” to your monitored search term list — we’ll be waiting for your hack submissions as usual. After all, we’ve seen some success stories when it comes to abandoned smart home devices – like the recent Insteon story, where a group of device owners bought out and restarted the service after the company got abruptly shut down.

We thank [Louis] for sharing this with us!

Your Voice Assistant Doesn’t Have To Be Cloudy

March 21, 2024 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

Voice assistants are neat — they let us interface with computers without having to bother with touching them at all. Still, many decry the perceived privacy intrusion these devices present, as they’re always trucking data off to corporate servers for all kinds of opaque reasons. Building your own standalone assistant is a way to get around that, and that’s precisely what [Tristram] did.

The build is based on an ESP32 Lyrat development board. Unlike most devboards, this one has two 3 watt audio outputs and mics on board, making it perfect for a build like this one. The Lyrat was paired with some NeoPixel LEDs and a pair of Dayton Audio 1.5″ speakers to enable it to interact with the user both audibly and visually.

[Tristram] steps through not only how to set up the voice assistant, but also how to build it into a simple and attractive enclosure that won’t unduly stand out in the average house. The Lyrat simply has to be flashed with firmware that enables it to work as a voice aid with Home Assistant platform.

If you’re unfamiliar, Home Assistant is a smart home architecture that you can run yourself on your own hardware, without having everything live in the cloud of some murky corporation.

Home Assistant has grown in popularity in recent years as a less intrusive smarthome solution. You can even use it to monitor your hot tub! Video after the break.

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