A few years ago we started with a stock automated chicken coop door. When it eventually failed, annoyed by the limitations and quality of cheap consumer IoT products, we engineered our own using an ESP32 microcontroller, Home Assistant, and ESPHome. We then added sensors for drinking water and feed levels, and have since iterated on several design choices.

In this talk, we’d like to share our experience — what worked, what didn’t — and discuss the hardware, software, and mechanical aspects of the implementation. After this talk you should be able to recreate our design for your own coop.