> If price weren’t a constraint, I immediately would have chosen a cellular IoT board like the Particle Electron or Boron ($50). Connectivity to the cloud provides several advantages:
I think we should question whether tech as a whole is moving in the right direction when the first question for building a time-controlled, battery-operated chicken door opener is "how do I connect it to the internet?"
(Sorry for the sarcasm, otherwise, it's a really cool project though)
If I am allowed some sarcasm as well, that is anyway the "old" approach, a more modern one would involve (besides the connection to the cloud) a camera, a database of "known" chickens and an AI (possibly a neural network) to identify (besides matching the actual authorized chicken wanting to enter with the image in the database) "chicken like" animals from "fox like" and similar ...
He could probably synchronize his RTC to the GPS system. GPS works by sending a clock signal plus satellite ID from each satellite. Devices using GPS then use an ephemeris to determine the location of each satellite and then calculate the relative position of the receiver.
I think we should question whether tech as a whole is moving in the right direction when the first question for building a time-controlled, battery-operated chicken door opener is "how do I connect it to the internet?"
(Sorry for the sarcasm, otherwise, it's a really cool project though)