Raising chickens can be a very rewarding endeavor, as they can provide fresh daily eggs and help get rid of pests in the yard. But, like all animals, they require care. Most importantly, you’ll need to ensure that they have regular food and water, and you’ll need to protect them from predators like coyotes, foxes, and cats. To ease the workload, you may want to consider building Coders Cafe’s DIY smart chicken coop that features AI-based predator detection.

The purpose of a coop, aside from being a comfy place for chickens to roost, is to provide protection from weather and predators. This design is pretty small and is probably only suitable for one or two chickens, but the concepts can be applied to larger coops. It provides a few very useful features: remote or automated feeding, remote or automated door operation, and predator detection with remote notifications. You’ll never have to worry that you forgot to feed the chickens or that you left the door open, and you can respond immediately if you get a notification about a predator.

An Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board oversees those features, operating the door and dispensing food using simple motor-driven mechanisms. A companion app lets the user set an automated door and food schedule, or perform those actions with the tap of the button. A Twilio app integration enables SMS alerts.

The predator-detecting magic works thanks to DFRobot’s HuskyLens AI camera sensor. Users can train that to recognize specific predators and then it will tell the Arduino if it sees one. That communication occurs over I2C and is easy to setup, removing all of the difficulty of implementing AI. 

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Art and engineering are not separate concepts. There is a great deal of overlap between the two and many modern disciplines increasingly blur those lines. Mónica Rikic is an “electronic artist and creative coder” who embodies that idea: you might remember her and her incredible Arduino UNO R4-powered installations from our blog post last year. In addition to her artistic practice, her technology-forward approach inspires her work as an educator, as she helps her master’s students develop hybrid concepts that use microcontrollers, sensors, lights and a variety of different technologies to create interactive art pieces. The level of creativity that technology is able to unleash is readily apparent in two of her students’ projects: Flora and Simbioceno.

Flora, created by College of Arts & Design of Barcelona students Judit Castells, Paula Jaime, Daniela Guevara, and Mariana Pachón, is a board game in the form of an interactive art installation. It was inspired by nature, with gameplay occurring throughout a simulated ecosystem. An Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board handles the interactive elements, with additional hardware including NFC readers, motors and accompanying drivers, sensors, pumps, LEDs, and more. 

Simbioceno, by Ander Vallejo Larre, Andrea Galano Toro, Pierantonio Mangia, and Rocío Gomez, also uses an UNO R4 WiFi. It consists of two ecosystems: one aquatic and one aerial-terrestrial. They exist in symbiosis, communicating and sharing resources as necessary. Hardware includes LEDs, pumps, and biofeedback sensors. The students put particular thought into the construction materials, many of which are recycled or biomaterials. 

Both projects are interactive art and expressions of creativity. While they do integrate technology, that technology isn’t the focal point. Instead, the technology helps to bring the two experiences to life.Feeling inspired by this creative use of the Arduino platform? We hope you’ll develop your own projects and share them with us and the entire community: contact creators@arduino.cc or upload directly to Project Hub! You could be our next Arduino Star.

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Every decade or two, humanity seems to develop a renewed interest in humanoid robots and their potential within our world. Because the practical applications are actually pretty limited (given the high cost), we inevitably begin to consider how those robots might function as entertainment. But Jon Hamilton did more than just wonder, he actually built a robotic performer called Syntaxx and it will definitely make you feel things.

It is hard to describe this robot without sounding like a Mad Libs game filled out by a cyberpunk-obsessed DJ. Hamilton designed it to give performances, primarily in the form of synthetic singing accompanied by electronic music. It looks like a crude Halloween mask given life by a misguided wizard sometime in the 1980s. It is pretty bonkers and you should probably watch the video of it in action to wrap your head around the concept.

Hamilton needed three different Arduino development boards to bring this robot to life. The first, an Arduino Giga R1 WiFi, oversees the robot’s operation and handles voice interaction, as well as audio playback. The second, an Arduino Mega 2560, moves the robot’s neck according to input from two microphones (one on the left, the other on the right). The third, an Arduino Uno R4 WiFi, controls the rest of the servo movement. 

The result is a robot that is both impressive and also pretty disconcerting. 

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