justinmklam
commented
4 years ago Thanks for checking out this project! I didn't think anyone would find it, but I actually never ended up finishing this since I eventually had to move and sell my hens. So you're treading in uncharted waters :)
Good catch about the up vs down motor movements. A quick fix could be to add an arbitrary multiplier to the up time, but that might be cumbersome to tune. I unfortunately don't have plans to continue working on this project!
Yes, I removed a few components on the RTC module to reduce the current consumption. I followed this post, which I'll copy here for reference:
Note: to reduce power consumption, I removed the power indication LED on the DS3213 board, the AT24C32D EEPROM, two 4.7K 4x resistor packs that were used as I2C pull up resistors (replaced these with 10K resistors on the breadboard, which you can see just to the left of the AutoPower module) and another resistor that implemented a crude charger circuit for the CR2032 (bad idea!) The photo below shows modified module where the components that were removed are circled in yellow. In retrospect, it would have probably been easier just to buy the DS3231 chip, and mount it on an appropriate SMD adapter board, as the IC includes everything you need except for a few bypass caps. The DS3231M version also comes in an 8 pin form factor, but this version is rated as slightly less accurate than the DS3231.
Hi Justin, I ordered some of your PCBs and build one of them for my own chicken coop. I literally found some issues with it. First of all thank you for sharing your repo.
One of the problems I've gotten is, that the force of my door let spin the motor faster than spinning upwards. In your code you calculate the average time of up and down spinning. This code part has to separated, because the open run timing should be longer than downwards (because door weight and force).
Another problem was running into was the power consumption, probably coming from the RTC and overall. I'm using exactly what you posted in your readme.md, but in sleep the discharge is about 6mAh without RTC and 40-45mAh with RTC. Do you have any suggestions to this?
The problem with the up and down spinning is a smaller problem, because I can adjust the speed of the forward and backward spinning to come close to the same up and downward time, but the power consumption is a really big mess.
Hopefully you're willing to help me and overwork the code once again?
Thanks for your time and help :)