We’re not sure if the Chickens know it yet, but they could be one of the reasons for all this IoT craze now a days. Look for chicken coop, and out come dozens of posts from the Hackaday chest.
Here’s another one from self confessed lazy engineer [Eric]. He didn’t want to wake up early to let his chickens out in the morning, or walk out to the coop to lock them up for the night to protect them from predators like Foxes, Raccoons and Opossum. So he built a Raspberry-Pi controlled chicken coop door that automates locking and unlocking. The details are clear from his video which you can watch after the break. The door mechanism looks inspired from an earlier anti-Raccoon gravity assist door.
The hardware (jpg image) is simple – a couple of hall sensors that detect the open/close status of the coop door that is driven by a DC motor via a bridge controller. The whole setup is controlled using a Raspberry-Pi and this is where the fun starts – because he can now add in all kinds of “feature creep”. Motion sensor, camera, light array, and anti-predator gizmos are all on his drawing board at the moment. Add in your feature requests in the comments below and let’s see if [Eric] can build the most advanced, complicated, gizmo filled chicken coop in the Universe. Combine that with this design, and it could even turn out to be the most beautiful too.

http://hackaday.com/2015/04/11/raspb...-chicken-door/