Vinnie’s Farm Automation Projects

A guide to the systems and projects I’ve built on the farm

This page brings together the full cornucopia of farm automation projects I have built and shared from our farmstead. Irrigation systems, environmental sensing, weather stations, power management, chicken coop automation, and everything in between.

If you are thinking of building this stuff yourself and want to avoid the usual LLM hallucinations, dig through these articles. You will find details on the hardware and software I have actually built, along with the good, the bad, and the ugly behind the design decisions that got me there.

Setting up the Farm

• This is My Dirt
  20-May-24 — The Farmsteading Adventure Begins.

• Be Water, My Friend
  01-May-24 — Our first irrigation project at Stella Porta.

Raspberry Pi Farm Irrigation System

1. Farm automation made easy as Pi
   01-May-25 — Setting up the foundation for real-world IoT on the farm.

2. Controlling the Irrigation Valves
   01-May-25 — The basics of switching solenoids, safely and reliably.

3. Reading from the 1-Wire Sensors
   06-May-25 — Building the temperature sensing layer.

4. Using the I2C Protocol to Communicate to Sensors
   07-May-25 — How we wired it, read it, and filtered out the crap.

5. Reading Environmental Data with I2C
   09-May-25 — Expanding the sensor net and interpreting the data.

6. Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
   26-May-25 — Detecting precipitation (and making decisions from it).

7. More I/O
   30-May-25 — Handling expansion and GPIO overload.

8. Getting the Data and Controlling the Devices from the REST API
   01-Jun-25 — Talking to your Pi from across the network.

9. Writing Your Own Device Plug-ins
   03-Jun-25 — Custom code to extend your system’s reach.

10. Using Software Devices to Build on the Hardware
    06-Jun-25 — Simulated devices and logic layers.

11. How to Make Things Happen Automatically
    07-Jun-25 — Trigger-based actions and logic chains.

12. Time Has Come Today
    12-Jun-25 — Scheduled tasks and automation routines.

13. There Are Always Conditions to Evaluate
    13-Jun-25 — Conditional logic for smarter systems.

14. Rolling My Own I²C and 1-Wire Interface Card
    21-Jun-25 — A custom hardware solution for real-world reliability.

15. Recording and Accessing Environmental Data Remotely
    01-Jul-25 — Logging and remote access to your system’s mind.

16. Preventing Injection Attacks to the Database
    07-Jul-25 — Keeping bad guys out of your Pi.

17. PWM: A Better Way to Control Sprinkler Valves
    21-Jul-25 — Fine-tuned voltage control for water flow.

18. Not Another Sprinkler Valve Article; TLDR

    2-Sep-25 — The elevator pitch

19. Smart Power Switch and Shutdown for Raspberry Pi
    05-Oct-25 - Battery Backup and controlled shutdown.

20. Why the Raspberry Pi GPIO API is broken and how to fix it
    11-Nov-25 - How a quiet change in Linux and libgpiod boned developers

21. Chasing Raspberry Pi Power Management
    26-Jan-26 — Lessons Learned Building a Power Switch with Deep Sleep and Wake Control

General stuff

• How did you make that?

  23-Jan-26 — What actually happens between an idea and a working circuit board

• Interview with Raspberry Pint
  30-Sep-25 - Building resilient systems that don’t need the cloud

• Using a Raspberry Pi to measure the cistern level

  14-Nov-21 — A better way to calculate water level

Weather Station

• Building a Dedicated Weather Station Display

  18-Dec-25 — Built a rock-solid, minimalist Raspberry Pi kiosk weather display

• Build Your Own Off-Grid Weather Station

  11-Dec-25 — A Raspberry Pi and SDR system for collecting local weather data without relying on anyone’s cloud.

• Here comes the Sun
  06-Mar-26 — How My Chicken Coop Controller Calculates Sunrise and Sunset

Chicken Coop Automation

• A Better Automatic Chicken Coop Door
  05-Mar-26 — From Backyard Chickens to 100-Bird Pasture Rotation

• Chicken Coop Door, Installed and Running

  26-Mar-26 — Video, installation photos, and command-line setup from the finished coop door controller

• The Humble Actuator

  11-Oct-25 — I2C-Based Linear Actuator Driver with Current Monitor

• Chicken Coop with Raspberry Pi

  27-Jan-22 — Version 2 of the coop controller

• Chicken Coop with Arduino platform

  17-Dec-20 — My first coop controller

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If you care about how things are made and why they’re built the way they are, you’ll probably like the rest of what I write about. It is not always electronics. Believe it or not, I have been known to jump from baking to perfume to motorcycles without much warning.

Hitting like and sharing helps real people find the work. The algorithm can go pound sand.