Flowering Elbow – Ecological Inventors, Designers, Makers & Educators – Upcycling Wales
Description: Flowering Elbow: Invent Design Make
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In this one, we’re making an automatic door for the chicken coop using an old wiper motor some scrap metal, and an Arduino. Before we started keeping chickens we knew we didn’t really want to be tied to getting up at the crack of dawn, or always being at home by dark to put them away. You can get commercial autodoors as pre-made kits to fit on the coop, and indeed we already had experience with one that used a linear actuator – although it was modified so it operated the door to the goose shed (they require
Upcycled wiper motors work well for this project because they come with speed-reducing gearing, are very robust, and have ample torque to move a door (even a big heavy door). That, and used ones are plentiful and cheap to get hold of at a scrappy or on e-bay! They are fairly standardized and usually have five wires. Two of these we can ignore for this kind of project (the two you can trace to the gearbox area). The others are a common (the white one in our case), a high, and a lower speed contact.
On the output, most of them, so far as I can tell, come with a tapered splined shaft, that conveniently ends with a male M8 thread. This can be joined to a host of different things. In our case we drilled and tapped an old keyed shaft and v-belt pulley that will form a ‘winding spindle’, to raise and lower the coop door. We happened to have this part but one could just as easily use a wooden spindle, which could be attached with an 8mm pronged insert nut. Another coupling method might be to use an M8 coupli
Flowering Elbow – Ecological Inventors, Designers, Makers & Educators – Upcycling Wales