I built a terrible chicken coop. Truly awful, cobbled together out of whatever junk I could find in a hurry in the dark, as my wife had a pair of chickens foisted upon her on the way home that evening.
It was enclosed. The largest aperture was 20mm. Even enclosed on the floor.
Anyway. Anyone who keeps chickens already knows what I fucked up there.
2am. Almighty screaming from outdoors. A chicken has managed to squeeze its head through the grille, and into the mouth of a fox. Everything then rapidly devolved into a surprisingly large amount of blood, where I’ll just elide the details as they’re kinda grim.
Anyway, the bodies went in the pot the next day, and I now know why chicken wire is specifically called chicken wire.
I would like to compliment the video for being useful to purpose, simple, no annoying TikTok voice over, no voice over at all as it's not necessary, no unnecessary text. It's just a simple here's the thing, here's it working, here's why it works, and here's some detail on how it was built.
There's something about these basic self-locking/self-unlocking mechanisms that's so satisfying. It's like they exercise my brain in a way it's not used to exercising, like that really good stretch you do sometimes that really hits that spot. Reminds me of knots: I geek out about knots sometimes, and it's just so profoundly weird to think "in knots", I feel like an alien when I'm doing knots, or like my brain is doing cirque-de-soleil-type contortions. I guess this says something about how mundane my usual mental activity is.
I love mechanisms. It's amazing how much mechanical complexity we were able to build before the advent of computers. Even more so when you learn how very minor changes like shaving a few degrees off an angle can be the difference between success and failure. As an embedded systems developer, I've been fortunate to work with a number of talented mechanical engineers over the years and come to realize that the complexity that they have to deal with isn't that far from what we have to do in software.
If you want to think in knots, go down the internet rabbit hole of investigating how the knotter in a hay baler works :-)
I love how so many mechanisms revolve (hehe) around revolutions - because that's the simplest form of mechanical effort to make and use.
I also love the accuracy you can get if you work on it - I'm thinking things like those giant castle doors weighing multiple tons, but a child can push them open if unbarred.
When it comes to theorizing/storytelling about humanity meeting a larger galactic society, there are a lot of concepts about different species-character or specializations. I've always been interested in unusual answers to "what might distinguish us."
For a while now, "brains can think of knots" has been on that list. Imagine some aliens who are generally much smarter than us, but they need computers to indirectly create or solve knots, and textiles were a late- rather than early-invention.
Granted, this seems unlikely, but it's still amusing to consider.
Same. I enjoy thinking how different an alien could be, and how I'd discover things that were so constant in my life that I wasn't even aware of them, until someone completely different appeared.
Several years ago I bought a product that aimed to solve this problem. It was a set of rails, a door, and a controller/motor that would raise and lower the door, via a string.
The door itself has a spring loaded catch at the bottom, which is retracted when the door is lifted, via a little mechanism built into the door. Pull up on the peg, the latch retracts, and you can slide the door open
The controller was the weakest part of this whole assembly. It worked, but was crude and often would lock hens out, like when summer thunderstorms would darken the sky. It just used a light sensor
Last year I replaced the controller with an Esphome device I built, and it's been going strong all summer and winter
I need a lock like this to prevent my hyper active toddler from leaving the house through the front door.
It'll be strange to replace my front door with a guillotine slider, but I'm willing to try about anything since I found him half a block away playing in a puddle last week.
I literally just tried to send one text message. Poof he was gone.
Thanks for the tip. I just ordered some. I'm worried this style won't work for my front door, unless I can mount it above the door. I have a fiberglass double door...
You're fortunate! Deadbolts are no match for our 22 month old... He already figured out how to disarm three types of safety latches, and he's halfway to opening the safety gates.
I don't want to show him too much television, but it's the only thing that keeps him in one place
You could just install one of those chain things so the door won’t open more than inch. The toddler isn’t tall enough to reach it. There’s non chain ones too, you see them in hotels, a little metal thing you flap open.
That would certainly be an easy off-the-shelf solution... Although if the door opens a crack, that also means a reckless toddler (is there any other kind?) could slam it on their own fingers.
There are some which are just hinged metal that can lock at a right-angle, one of those would give tighter no-finger-gap tolerances, while also being structurally weaker in case of emergency.
Smart chicken coop doors are sub-$100 on Amazon now.
If you want to spend a bit more and don't like "smart" doors, I used one of these for years and was reasonably satisfied: https://chickendoors.com/
In my next coop I think I want something with enough smarts to let me know if it ever fails. That is, it reports status and if the server notices it hasn't gotten a report, I get an alert.
> That is, it reports status and if the server notices it hasn't gotten a report, I get an alert.
I’m working on exactly that, called SecureCoop. Being in IT the lack of notifications on doors was a huge concern. So I (over-)built redundancies and notifications and server monitoring and clustering.
I’m still working out kinks in the prototype but I hope to be selling later this year. Need to take it to an FCC lab to verify that it doesn’t cause excess interference, and then I can sell.
I have a radio controlled chicken door that I control through home assistant via a hack rf. It has a reed switch placed behind the door, and a magnet attached to the door to let you know door status, with failure stating "open".
And then a reminder sent to my phone 10 minutes past dusk to shut the door, if it is still open at that time.
It's rigged but the confirmation is nice.
Edit: most of sensors run by esp32 boards running esphome. Also include a temp sensor etc, fed into home assistant
Here's my fun everything likes to eat chickens story. When we first built our house, nobody had ever lived within about 2 miles of our farm. There were coyotes everywhere. So I spent a couple years trapping and shooting them after they ate a couple of my chickens. Then came the racoons. They ate some chickens so back to trapping and shooting. Then weasels and minks. Except they could get into the coop through the windows in the wall that were covered in wire and 6' off the ground. So, more traps. Now it's bobcats. Oh, and don't forget the stupid red-tailed hawks and BALD FUCKING EAGLES as well. No trapping or shooting those bastards.
Everything. Everything eats chickens. I'm surprised I haven't seen a damn frog eating one of them.
The first week after we got chickens my wife comes to me upset and tells me one of them died overnight. Apparently it's covered in slime and neither of us knows what to make of that.
A few days later it happens again. Huh, so she asks some locals what the heck is going on. It turns out a big snake was getting in there and eating the chicken, but then he was too fat to get back out of the coop so he had to barf it up to escape.
Yes but they are usually just the first ones to get eaten. So now we keep a jersey giant to scare off the coons, and a bantam something or other to scare off the hawks/eagles.
I'm not around a lot of foxes, but I imagine so: They both burrow and hunt burrowing prey, so "lift and scrape this obstacle of the way" is in their skillet.
Separate doors make it easier to access without releasing the chickens, if you need to (they're relatively habitual and if they never use the "people door" they won't really try to).
Easier to automate a small door, and control where it goes.
It looks cooler; people like "small doors for small things" - like the half-height garage doors at Walmart for shopping carts.
If small enough, it can reduce at least SOME predator incidents (but this is minor).
The dedicated chicken door can be automated. It's nice to be able to go on vacation, or sleep in, or not suddenly wake up and wonder if you remembered to shut the door.
what's the chickenwire tunnel at the front door for? only thing i can think of is it lets the chickens see if there's a bird of prey above? but I don't know if that's something chickens are checking. or keeps certain large predators from fiddling with the door (but not large like a bear), but doesn't seem the door should open anyway
We have some friends who have a really well-built chicken coop. Sometimes we help them with the birds when they are out of town and bring back eggs.
A while back they had a stump in front of the house with a family of foxes living in it and they pointed a game camera at it.
Night after night they got footage of the fox mama bringing back other people's chickens to feed to her kits.
The moral is, I think, that the well-built chicken coop is a good investment.
I built a terrible chicken coop. Truly awful, cobbled together out of whatever junk I could find in a hurry in the dark, as my wife had a pair of chickens foisted upon her on the way home that evening.
It was enclosed. The largest aperture was 20mm. Even enclosed on the floor.
Anyway. Anyone who keeps chickens already knows what I fucked up there.
2am. Almighty screaming from outdoors. A chicken has managed to squeeze its head through the grille, and into the mouth of a fox. Everything then rapidly devolved into a surprisingly large amount of blood, where I’ll just elide the details as they’re kinda grim.
Anyway, the bodies went in the pot the next day, and I now know why chicken wire is specifically called chicken wire.
I would like to compliment the video for being useful to purpose, simple, no annoying TikTok voice over, no voice over at all as it's not necessary, no unnecessary text. It's just a simple here's the thing, here's it working, here's why it works, and here's some detail on how it was built.
Yes and I would have even seen the video, if a newsletter popup hadn't obscured the entire screen.
The channel owner seem to be a non-speaking person so that explains it.
There's something about these basic self-locking/self-unlocking mechanisms that's so satisfying. It's like they exercise my brain in a way it's not used to exercising, like that really good stretch you do sometimes that really hits that spot. Reminds me of knots: I geek out about knots sometimes, and it's just so profoundly weird to think "in knots", I feel like an alien when I'm doing knots, or like my brain is doing cirque-de-soleil-type contortions. I guess this says something about how mundane my usual mental activity is.
I love mechanisms. It's amazing how much mechanical complexity we were able to build before the advent of computers. Even more so when you learn how very minor changes like shaving a few degrees off an angle can be the difference between success and failure. As an embedded systems developer, I've been fortunate to work with a number of talented mechanical engineers over the years and come to realize that the complexity that they have to deal with isn't that far from what we have to do in software.
If you want to think in knots, go down the internet rabbit hole of investigating how the knotter in a hay baler works :-)
I love how so many mechanisms revolve (hehe) around revolutions - because that's the simplest form of mechanical effort to make and use.
I also love the accuracy you can get if you work on it - I'm thinking things like those giant castle doors weighing multiple tons, but a child can push them open if unbarred.
When it comes to theorizing/storytelling about humanity meeting a larger galactic society, there are a lot of concepts about different species-character or specializations. I've always been interested in unusual answers to "what might distinguish us."
For a while now, "brains can think of knots" has been on that list. Imagine some aliens who are generally much smarter than us, but they need computers to indirectly create or solve knots, and textiles were a late- rather than early-invention.
Granted, this seems unlikely, but it's still amusing to consider.
Same. I enjoy thinking how different an alien could be, and how I'd discover things that were so constant in my life that I wasn't even aware of them, until someone completely different appeared.
I don't understand; where is the cloud connection to an LLM agent? I don't even see how you could get Kubernetes or React in this thing.
Several years ago I bought a product that aimed to solve this problem. It was a set of rails, a door, and a controller/motor that would raise and lower the door, via a string.
The door itself has a spring loaded catch at the bottom, which is retracted when the door is lifted, via a little mechanism built into the door. Pull up on the peg, the latch retracts, and you can slide the door open
The controller was the weakest part of this whole assembly. It worked, but was crude and often would lock hens out, like when summer thunderstorms would darken the sky. It just used a light sensor
Last year I replaced the controller with an Esphome device I built, and it's been going strong all summer and winter
https://pdx.su/blog/2025-06-11-how-a-simple-chicken-coop-doo...
I need a lock like this to prevent my hyper active toddler from leaving the house through the front door.
It'll be strange to replace my front door with a guillotine slider, but I'm willing to try about anything since I found him half a block away playing in a puddle last week.
I literally just tried to send one text message. Poof he was gone.
I gave my parents a godawful scare as a five year old when I escaped from my grandmother’s house and went to my aunt’s house five blocks away.
I would not want to parent myself. Good kid, generally, so you let your guard down, but when I did go wild it was stuff like that.
Edit: 1970s, no cell phones. Still have a great sense of direction.
Check out a lock like this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07DR9CMGZ
Mount it near the top of the door, out of reach of the small escape artist.
I had exactly the same problem and this solved it.
Thanks for the tip. I just ordered some. I'm worried this style won't work for my front door, unless I can mount it above the door. I have a fiberglass double door...
Using two of these between the levers for now: https://www.amazon.com/U-Shaped-Proofing-Cabinets-Adjustable...
Other options involve drilling into the door face which I'm not keen on...
Also, I ordered some of these too https://www.snappower.com/pages/huglock
I have this problem, but I just lock the front door.
You're fortunate! Deadbolts are no match for our 22 month old... He already figured out how to disarm three types of safety latches, and he's halfway to opening the safety gates.
I don't want to show him too much television, but it's the only thing that keeps him in one place
You could just install one of those chain things so the door won’t open more than inch. The toddler isn’t tall enough to reach it. There’s non chain ones too, you see them in hotels, a little metal thing you flap open.
Thanks. The front door is a wood grain textured fiberglass double door, so I want to avoid drilling into the door face. It's an interesting challenge.
Trying two of these between the levers for now: https://www.amazon.com/U-Shaped-Proofing-Cabinets-Adjustable...
Plus, I found this, hoping it will work for me without too much damage to the door: https://www.snappower.com/pages/huglock
That would certainly be an easy off-the-shelf solution... Although if the door opens a crack, that also means a reckless toddler (is there any other kind?) could slam it on their own fingers.
There are some which are just hinged metal that can lock at a right-angle, one of those would give tighter no-finger-gap tolerances, while also being structurally weaker in case of emergency.
https://www.homedepot.com/pep/Prime-Line-1-3-8-in-Door-Lock-...
Yep, those thingies. They're also easier to remove afterwards without too much door-scarring, since the contact-portion is on the inside frame.
The price is ridiculous but I've been happy with the design of https://www.ladiesfirstchickendoor.com/products/
In the city the door doesn't always shut but I think I could adjust that, I just haven't needed to.
Smart chicken coop doors are sub-$100 on Amazon now.
If you want to spend a bit more and don't like "smart" doors, I used one of these for years and was reasonably satisfied: https://chickendoors.com/
In my next coop I think I want something with enough smarts to let me know if it ever fails. That is, it reports status and if the server notices it hasn't gotten a report, I get an alert.
> That is, it reports status and if the server notices it hasn't gotten a report, I get an alert.
I’m working on exactly that, called SecureCoop. Being in IT the lack of notifications on doors was a huge concern. So I (over-)built redundancies and notifications and server monitoring and clustering.
I’m still working out kinks in the prototype but I hope to be selling later this year. Need to take it to an FCC lab to verify that it doesn’t cause excess interference, and then I can sell.
I have a radio controlled chicken door that I control through home assistant via a hack rf. It has a reed switch placed behind the door, and a magnet attached to the door to let you know door status, with failure stating "open".
And then a reminder sent to my phone 10 minutes past dusk to shut the door, if it is still open at that time.
It's rigged but the confirmation is nice.
Edit: most of sensors run by esp32 boards running esphome. Also include a temp sensor etc, fed into home assistant
Would a fox be able to lift the wood without the hinge lock? Say if it was just tied directly without the hinge to block lifting it.
If not a fox, a raccoon can.
Here's my fun everything likes to eat chickens story. When we first built our house, nobody had ever lived within about 2 miles of our farm. There were coyotes everywhere. So I spent a couple years trapping and shooting them after they ate a couple of my chickens. Then came the racoons. They ate some chickens so back to trapping and shooting. Then weasels and minks. Except they could get into the coop through the windows in the wall that were covered in wire and 6' off the ground. So, more traps. Now it's bobcats. Oh, and don't forget the stupid red-tailed hawks and BALD FUCKING EAGLES as well. No trapping or shooting those bastards.
Everything. Everything eats chickens. I'm surprised I haven't seen a damn frog eating one of them.
I enjoyed this movie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Biggest_Little_Farm
Similar challenges, but attempts at natural solutions (not easy, so much complexity)
Trailer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UfDTM4JxHl8
If your interests run bucolic you may be interested in the upcoming 3h documentary "The Valley".
https://thevalleyfilm.au/
It's a super cute movie but I think it's pretty heavily dramatized. The owner is a filmmaker so it was a sort reality TV project from the beginning.
Totally enjoyable watch, but I wouldn't look for real world farming advice here.
The first week after we got chickens my wife comes to me upset and tells me one of them died overnight. Apparently it's covered in slime and neither of us knows what to make of that.
A few days later it happens again. Huh, so she asks some locals what the heck is going on. It turns out a big snake was getting in there and eating the chicken, but then he was too fat to get back out of the coop so he had to barf it up to escape.
My chickens must have been born in the Bronx, because they've cornered an opossum, bloodied coons and only one has ever "lost" to a fox.
Jesus. You bought what sounds like a beautiful place and murdered your way to a couple dozen eggs...
Proof that dogs are the smart wolves. Get domesticated, get a steady food supply for the small price of “don’t fuck with humans”.
An accurate summation of humanity over the last few thousand years.
Bloodlust makes them taste better?
Do you have a rooster to help fight the chaos?
Yes but they are usually just the first ones to get eaten. So now we keep a jersey giant to scare off the coons, and a bantam something or other to scare off the hawks/eagles.
How is a bantam helpful with eagles?
They're the only ones that seem to want to fight the eagles. They're HYPER aggressive. I don't get it.
Thanks so much, good to know. We want chickens in a place with eagle problems.
I'm not around a lot of foxes, but I imagine so: They both burrow and hunt burrowing prey, so "lift and scrape this obstacle of the way" is in their skillet.
*skillset, and now I'm imagining a much darker version of that Disney Robin-Hood cartoon.
Probably. I used to have a pet parrot that learned how to open its cage from watching me unlatch it every day.
Probably, but it'd be pretty trivial to add some weight to the door.
For those who have chicken coops: why do you have separate doors for chicken and people?
My dad used to keep chicken and they just went through the same door and we'd just open it in the morning and close it in the evening.
Other people in my home town have similar arrangements and I feel I'm missing some important thing :)
Separate doors make it easier to access without releasing the chickens, if you need to (they're relatively habitual and if they never use the "people door" they won't really try to).
Easier to automate a small door, and control where it goes.
It looks cooler; people like "small doors for small things" - like the half-height garage doors at Walmart for shopping carts.
If small enough, it can reduce at least SOME predator incidents (but this is minor).
For me: the chicken door goes into a fenced enclosure to keep the chickens safe from predators.
I don't want to enter the enclosure, so I have my own door to go in and service the coop, fetch the eggs, etc.
The enclosure has a gate when I want to let the chickens out, as well.
Having an enclosure lets me leave the house for a couple days, at least, and not feel like I've imprisoned them.
The dedicated chicken door can be automated. It's nice to be able to go on vacation, or sleep in, or not suddenly wake up and wonder if you remembered to shut the door.
Blocked by Cloudflare. Anyone else?
Same. Looking at your username, guessing, you are accessing from Japan too.
Also blocked connecting from Japan. Fuck cloudflare.
This is a setting by the site owner though, isn't it?
Same here. It's getting quite common for me.
Yes. I'm in Brazil.
Yes. Hate it.
what's the chickenwire tunnel at the front door for? only thing i can think of is it lets the chickens see if there's a bird of prey above? but I don't know if that's something chickens are checking. or keeps certain large predators from fiddling with the door (but not large like a bear), but doesn't seem the door should open anyway
Such a great personal project!
These kind of things is what the ‘www’ was created for - good vibes!
Why riddle it with ads?
It’s an expensive hobby on top of server / service costs to run the site?
Source: myself through wife which is maxed on chickens and has her own site with no ads
It should be profitable from just the eggs (source also wife) unless you're overpaying for server costs
Fair.
And I my point was I really like the site!
I promise to become lessvocal about the ads.
Won't hold against a squatch tho :)