Has anyone had luck taking an off the shelf automatic chicken coop door and integrating it with home assistant? I’d prefer not to build a mechanism to open/close the door. The existing door is larger than most but I could fill it in some so an off the shelf unit would fit. The current manual door uses a rope over a pulley to lift the door from outside the run. I’m leaning towards trying to use one of those “winch” type auto door openers as it’d fit right in with what we have and be easy to bypass by pulling on an emergency string to open the door if the automatic part fails (easy for kid or neighbor if I’m not around to look at auto door).
I’ve seen some with up/down momentary buttons but I cant tell if they directly control the door or if they’re for navigating through a UI. Some of them have remote controls, which might be a way to take control. Anything else out there?
Coop doesnt have power, but is in wifi range, I plan on setting up a rechargeable battery with solar panel, to power a wifi camera, maybe the door, maybe some other sensors.
I remember more than one user in this forum sharing their builds - did you try the search?
Sounds like a esphome project 
Hi Ikt
I did some research into store bought coop doors before going DIY and the availability at the time was rather limited and rather pricey for my taste. Most of those I looked at had a push button to open or close the door and I imagine those buttons could easily be “IoTed” with an ESP8266 acting as the device closing the button, directly or using a relay.
Regarding the power for the coop I went full solar with a car battery acting as the power bank for two 100W panels and it has been a good setup with exception to the grounding issue. I did some reading on “off-grid living” and apparently grounding a full home setup is a real issue which would require copper wiring in the ground etc, I haven’t gone there. Gradually I however found I needed to connect more and more devices and had to move from ESP8266 to an ESP32 which had more pinouts. Six relayed devices, I2C current sensor, LED strip, door servo. Padon the mixed SWE/ENG naming.
My main stuggle has been to find a platform that would provide a video feed without drawing to much amps and after some time using a Rasberry Pi4 with motioneyeOS and two webcams I settled for the ESP32-CAM chip which only gives me 1fps but four cameras draw 400mA@12V instead of 900mA for the Pi4 setup.
I did, and everything I saw was using a home built door drive rather than adapting a commercially available coop door. Kids and wife would be pretty upset with me if I did my own door motor and it ended up squashing one of their pet chickens. The pre-made doors tend to have a safety to prevent that from happening.
I do already have esphome involved, with an esp32 cam plugged into a usb battery bank that I bring in to re-charge. It’s not much, but it does show that wifi works out at the coop.
I haven’t made it far in this part yet, as I’m not sure how much power I’ll need. There’s a lot of activity around making packs out of 18650 cells. I may try that route, if it lines up with the power requirements.