The goal of this project is to automate our chicken shed to such a level that the chickens can survive our summer vacation without outside help.

The project is based on Domoticz(rPi) and MySensors (Sparkfun Redboard)
Sensors in the shed :

• Temperature + humidity
• Ambient light sensor
• Current/voltage on the solar panels and on the motor
• PIR sensor
• End-of-run switches
• Two buttons for local activation of the door

Actuators :

• DC motor for opening/closing the door
• Relais for switching the inside light
• Relais for switching the webcam

The board arduino shield for connecting all the wiring

The complete installation
From left to right : (temporary) router for remote USB connection for uploading sketches, Arduino with shields, DC motor, Solar charging controller.
,

The shed in the making

The door mechanism & one of the end-of-run sensors

Overview photo with solar panels

Can I suggest adding an "IDE" subcategory under the Development category ?
I'm investigationg PlatformIO as an alternative for the Arduino IDE and Visual Micro for writing MySensors programs and was surprised not to find much info on the forum.
Maybe having and IDE subcategory could spark some discussion about this - interesting - subject

@tbowmo Both food and water are "gravitationally supplied". There is a 15liter food and 1l water supply indoor and 12l water supply outdoor. These last for weeks.

Wifi webcam is connected to Synology NAS camera app for recording. The aim is to enable the camera 5min before and after the closing of the door. Outdoor camera is on the wish list. Camera's can be enabled both automatically and remotely (like the door). Good news is that the chickens are smart enough to move out of harms way when the door closes. I noticed that the chickens go indoor very punctually on the internet provided sun-down, so the lux sensors may not be needed after all.

Remaining isuues are collecting of eggs and droppings. Both are less urgent and much more difficult to accomplish.

I'd like to have some way to set parameters/settings in nodes.
For example, my chicken shed is one Mysensors node that combines multiple sensors and actuators. I'd like to be able to update settings like sunset, sunrise, lux treshold, light (de-)activation time, etc without having to recompile the arduino sketch.
I prefer to have the basic logic in the sensor node, not in the controller so that the shed continues to function even when the controller is down.
I'm building my own micro-services based controller that will be able to handle settings/parameters but need some mechanism to tranverse the MySensors radio path.

Yes, we have foxes (and rats) in the neighbourhood. Chicks get eaten if not locked up at night. The fence is only 1m high, but won't keep a fox away from the chickens.
I thought about RfId, but question is if one reader will detect tags anywhere in the shed.
Voice recognition is another option to account for all chickens. Maybe when I find the time. Pool automation must be taken care of first
Anyway, it works as it is. Just need to set the light level in between chicken bed time and fox lunch time.

Hi,

I love the sensebender micro, having about five of them around the house measuring all kinds of things. Being able to buy the assembled PCB from the internet is great !

The compactness of the design is nice for building really small sensors, but in my humble opinion has one mayor drawback. There is no easy way to mechanically fix the PCB into a housing. Not suprisingly, I haven't seen a compelling case designs for the sensebender micro yet. Most designs have the board and the batteries floating inside.

I always end up fixing the naked PCB with two-sided tape to a wall or a to a piece of furniture, usually fixing the batteries right next to the sensor PCB in the same manner. The net effect being that my wife is becoming increasingly unsupportive of my MySensors hobby !

May I suggest that for future designs the wife factor is taken into account ? Two diagonal holes to fit screws and some free PCB space underneath for supports would be very helpfull.

Stefaan

Hi,

I'd like to write settings/parameters to my chicken shed sensor/actuator node. For instance lux level settings, sunset and sundown time, light activation time, etc.
Has anyone done something similar ? If so, what MySensors mechanism did you use ?
Do you think there is a need for a specific mechanism to send settings to nodes ?

Stefaan

Sorry for the typo above.

I've created a sensor node that could sleep most of the time but needs to receive messages occasionally. I'm eager to reduce the power draw since it is solar/battery powered. The controller is Domoticz.
Sleep mode doesn't work for incoming messages (to the sensor) because Domoticz doesn't support message delaying.

My question : is it feasible to create a gateway that buffers messages from the controller to the sensor until the sensor node wakes up ? That way sleep mode can be supported without any changes to the controller software.

@breimann , all of that will take a few posts to explain. Bear with me.

The door mechanism took a lot of trial and error. My biggest advise is to estimate the torque needed to open the door before ordering any components.

Due to lack of a dynamometer, here is how I tackled the problem :

1. Attach an elastic band to the door at some position where you know the distance to the hinges (15cm in my case)

2. Pulls the elastic band towards you in a right angle to the door until the door starts to move. Measure or estimate how much the elastic band is stretched (in my case, I measured +/-30cm). Be careful the door doesn't smach into your face

3. Disconnect the elastic band from the door and suspend some adjustable weight to it until it is stretched the same amount as before. I used a small bottle, an iron wire and changed the amount of water in the bottle.

4. Measure the weight
   

5. The torque is distance (to the hinges) x the weight, in my case 15cm x 0.285kg = 4.275 kg.cm

I selected a Modelcraft RB350600-0A101R Transmissiemotor 12 V 1:600 (25€ at Conrad).
According to the datasheet, at 3.44kg.cm (closest in the list), the motor should run at 9,46 rpm and consume 0,14A (12V).
In reality, the motor takes about 3,5s to make half a turn, which amounts to 8,6 rpm and pulls between 150 and 200mA with a startup current of +/- 350mA. Pretty close to what the data sheet says !

For the actuation of the motor, I use two relays of a Seeeduino relay shield of which I connected the NO to 0V, the NC to 12V and each motor wire to one of the COM. The resulting behavior is
R1 open, R2 open ==> motor stops
R1 closed, R2 open ==> motor turns CW
R1 open, R2 closed ==> motor turns CCW
R1 closed, R2 closed==> motor stops

Some more advise,
Don't try to open the door with a stepper motor. i tried it and I got bad oscillations.
A servo motor could also work, but you'll have to find one that can deliver the torque.

@sundberg84, @pjr
I prefer to have basic automation in the sensor/actuator combination itself. then if the controller is off-line, the chickens still survive.
Since my controller is a mix of test/production environment it is nog uncommon for it fail. One common thing is that USB ports change names after reboot in which can both the MySensors and the RfxCom devices stop communicating.

Can I suggest adding an "IDE" subcategory under the Development category ?
I'm investigationg PlatformIO as an alternative for the Arduino IDE and Visual Micro for writing MySensors programs and was surprised not to find much info on the forum.
Maybe having and IDE subcategory could spark some discussion about this - interesting - subject

Is there a board definition for sensebender micro for PlatformIO available ?

Hi, I've come across a problem where the MySensors binding seems to make some claim on the serial port of other bindings (RFXcom in my case), preventing the other binding to work properly.
The case is documented here on github.
Is this a bug in the MySensors binding or somehow linked to my setup and configuration ?
Any ideas on how to further investigate / solve this problem ?

Hi,

I love the sensebender micro, having about five of them around the house measuring all kinds of things. Being able to buy the assembled PCB from the internet is great !

The compactness of the design is nice for building really small sensors, but in my humble opinion has one mayor drawback. There is no easy way to mechanically fix the PCB into a housing. Not suprisingly, I haven't seen a compelling case designs for the sensebender micro yet. Most designs have the board and the batteries floating inside.

I always end up fixing the naked PCB with two-sided tape to a wall or a to a piece of furniture, usually fixing the batteries right next to the sensor PCB in the same manner. The net effect being that my wife is becoming increasingly unsupportive of my MySensors hobby !

May I suggest that for future designs the wife factor is taken into account ? Two diagonal holes to fit screws and some free PCB space underneath for supports would be very helpfull.

Stefaan

@tbowmo OK, is working now after restarting the bundle in OH.
Must have been the permission problem after all.
Thanks for your help !!

@tbowmo Definately ttyACM0
However, the setserial command returns information that doesn't look good : port0 and IRQ0. Does the board need a driver under Linux ?

stefaan@home:~$ sudo setserial /dev/ttyACM0
/dev/ttyACM0, UART: unknown, Port: 0x0000, IRQ: 0, Flags: low_latency```

ttyUSB0 is a (different) RFXcom device

Here is my configuration file (mysensors.things)
Bridge mysensors:bridge-ser:gateway [ serialPort="/dev/ttyACM0", sendDelay=200 ]
{
humidity keuken_vochtigheid [ nodeId="3", childId="2", smartSleep=true ]
temperature keuken_temperatuur [ nodeId="3", childId="1", smartSleep=true ]
}

I suppose ttyACM0 because of
stefaan@home:~$ dmesg |grep -i tty
[ 0.000000] console [tty0] enabled
[ 22.328631] 8086228A:00: ttyS4 at MMIO 0x81420000 (irq = 39, base_baud = 2764800) is a 16550A
[ 22.329059] 8086228A:01: ttyS5 at MMIO 0x8141e000 (irq = 40, base_baud = 2764800) is a 16550A
[ 23.106128] usb 1-4: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[362074.592743] cdc_acm 1-3:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device

There seems to be a premissions problem om the port :
stefaan@home:~$ cat /dev/ttyACM0
cat: /dev/ttyACM0: Permission denied

doing 'sudo usermod -a -G dialout openhab' doesn't help

Anyone any ideas ?

Hi, I'm trying to activate a sensebender gateway in OH2 on Ubuntu 16.04, however I'm having trouble setting up the serial port. Is there a how-to somewhere ? I suspect the serial port name is /dev/ttyACM0, but I'm not sure. How can I test ?
MySensors bundle is reported to be active, but there's no messages coming in. I set the log level for mysensors to DEBUG, but nothing on the log.

Which driver to use on Ubuntu 16.04 ?