🐔 Chick Chalet
A self-driving mobile chicken tractor that grazes our hens across the front pasture — automatically.
Live telemetry feed will appear here once the chalet is on the pasture.
What is the Chick Chalet?
A weatherproof rolling coop that walks itself a fresh strip of grass every day or two — so the chickens get rotational grazing benefits (bug control, fertilization, healthier eggs) without us hauling a wagon by hand every morning.
How it works
- Drive: two powered wheelchair-grade gear motors with electromagnetic park brakes (Quantum Q6 Edge), differential steering, no skid-pivots on slope.
- Brain: single Raspberry Pi 5 with a hardware watchdog timer — if the software ever locks up, the motors cut on their own.
- Power: 24V LiFePO4 battery + 200W solar + Victron MPPT. Charges itself.
- Safety stack: three independent ways to kill the motors — physical e-stop button, mechanical tilt switch, and the watchdog. Any one will park it.
- Lane navigation: drives the fall line of the slope (long axis pointed downhill at all times), shifts laterally with gentle 45° merges + reverse uphill — never a 90° pivot.
- Self-improvement: 1 Hz GPS + IMU telemetry log builds a slope heatmap of the pasture. A nightly job recommends route refinements based on what the chalet actually felt rolling around.
Predator alarm
When parked overnight, the chalet acts as a guard. Its IMU watches for tilt or impact, the Pi camera watches the chickens, and two USB cameras cover the inside of the coop and the run. A disturbance trips a chirp. A real attempt trips a strobe + siren + a Discord alert with snapshots. A serious tip attempt escalates to continuous siren + an SMS to the farm.
Why we're building it
Pasture-raised birds are healthier and the eggs taste better, but rotational grazing only works if you actually move the coop. It's the kind of chore that gets skipped on cold mornings. Automating it means the chickens get the benefit on day 1, day 30, and day 300 — not just on the days we're feeling motivated.
Live feed (coming soon)
Once the chalet is on the pasture, this section will show its current GPS position on a map of the front pasture, the latest run-camera snapshot, and a daily slope/route heatmap.
Project started 2026-04. Built by Jess and the kids, on the farm, in our spare time.