Howest MCT: Smart ChickenHouse

Hello, I am Milan Chombaere and I am a student at Howest Kortrijk. In our first year we have the assignment to make a Project 1. This is a project that you work on almost the entire month of June and present to your teachers. I came up with the Idea to make a Smart ChickenHouse, this is basically a regular chickenhouse but with sensors that you can read on a website and activate a servomotor to release food for the chickens to eat. I came up with this idea because we have chickens at home, and sometimes when its raining we have to feed our chickens. But now by just clicking on a button on my website you can release food while sitting inside a warm house. https://github.com/howest-mct/2022-2023-projectone-MilanChombaere this is the link to my GitHub where you can find the code and even more stuff!!

-RC522 sensor (A Badge scanner that wil make you be able to edit how many eggs you found inside the house)

-HCSR04 (A distance sensor that will capture how many chickens enter and exit the chickenhouse)

-LCD screen (An LCD screen that prints the IP of your Raspberry Pi and you can print the sensor data aswell)

- 2 Buttons (1 button is used for releasing food and the other one is used for turning of the Raspberry Pi)

-DS18B20 Sensor (A sensor that is able to measure the temperature inside the chickenhouse)

-LDR sensor (A Sensor that measures the light impact inside the chickenhouse and converts its into percentage)

-MCP3008 (A Bus that makes it possible to measure the light impact from the LDR sensor)

-PCF8574 ( A Bus that stores most of the LCD Screen pins)

The Chickenhouse is 60 cm high, the widht is 50 cm. The door to enter the house has a height of 30 cm and a widht of 15 cm. This cottage is capable of holding 1-2 fairly big chickens or a couple of small ones.

In these adobe PDF files you can see how to connect all the wires and where they belong on the Raspberry Pi. You can tell every sensor on the schematic and on the board apart by all the different color of whires.

I tried to make my site as simple as possible so when you want some information about the chickenhouse you can find it very quickly. On these images you can see all the sensors in my chickenhouse, and a button to active the servomotor. On the Second webpage (Buttons) you are able to choose what you would like to print on the LCD Display: By pressing on "Light Percentage" or "Temperature" you can print the values on the display. If you press "Badge Number": You will be able to see the badge number of the last badge that got scanned. To see on the LCD dipslay how many chickens walked by the HCSR04. When you activate the program you will constantly see the IP Address onto the LCD, but if you have printed another value onto the display you can change it back to IP address by pressing the "IP Address" button. And if you would like you can show the Date of today on the LCD. And the last button will let you clear the display if you like a non symbol screen.

My father is a woodworker and because of him the making of this house was very easy. He made the Chickenhouse out of MDF plates. This is a very strong and not that of an expensive material that can provide a very nice chickenhouse.

For this project I have used brown paint because it matches the nature where the my chickens;

Putting in the electronics was very tricky, because i have used very thin and sensitive wires. But by working very calm and connecting the wires one by one this now worked perfectly (I know that the cables are not very organised).