How to make a sliding, self-locking, and predator-proof chicken coop door (2020)

PaulHoule

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.

dmos62

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.

koolba

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.

dylan604

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.

fsckboy

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

catoc

Such a great personal project! These kind of things is what the ‘www’ was created for - good vibes! Why riddle it with ads?

riffraff

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 :)

hiroshi3110

Blocked by Cloudflare. Anyone else?

paradox460

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...

stickfigure

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.

rossdavidh

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.

kriskrunch

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.