I've kept chickens for ~7 years as of this writing and employed automation for the majority of those years. Chickens are great fun and one of the easiest animals to farm; the addition of automation eliminates some of the more mundane chores. I subscribe to a pasturing approach where chickens are given unrestricted access to my surrounding woodlands, meadows, and wetlands - there are a number of benefits to this system of management that I won't dive into here. Aside from fire mitigation, the property remains in a fairly wild and unaltered state and all active management centers around the coop - this is in contrast to other systems where birds are confined to cages, coops, and optionally attached runs in accordance with metrics on minimum cubic feet per bird. Motivation Over the last few months I've been mulling over a new design for my chicken coop automation system. It's been nearly 2 years since the last refresh and few new dynamics are in play for the 4th version:
Appliance failure #2! The culprit was our Rheem Tankless Water Heater and took a fair amount of spelunking through the web, service documents, and a good old fashioned teardown to resolve the issues - plural as there were actually two error codes generated. Error Code "76" The first error code indicated communication failure between the "Remote" (HMI device which attaches to the wall next to the water heater) and "PCB" (as there is only one printed circuit board in the unit, Rheem refers to it as "PCB"). Upon examination of the PCB, I noted a few of the capacitors had bulged. Typically one would desolder and replace with comparably rated parts, but with 1/2" of potting compound encasing the board, it would be quite the operation to selectively remove and re-pot. I came across a random post on Amazon which mentioned resolving the issue by shorting the communication terminals with a capacitor - this implies that degradation of the capacitor(