Matt Resolved to End the Morning Madness

Additional parts required: enclosure and cover, resistors, capacitors, switching regulator, and amplifiersTechnical DescriptionPurpose: To train roosters to crow softly rather than at full volume!Hypothesis: It has been observed that when the coop is kept dark the roosters do not crow very much if at all. I suspect that the roosters do not like darkness very much. Use this possibility to effect a change in the roosters behaviour.Method: Make the coop dark when a rooster crows above a certain volume. A crow sensor consisting of a microphone and amplifier puts out a signal that is digitized by the on-board A/D converter of a microcontroller. The microcontroller monitors the magnitude and the zero-crossing rate of the digitized signal. It also keeps track of time. If it is daylight hours and a rooster crows and the volume is above the acceptable threshold the shutter is closed. The microcontroller is also responsible for maintaining extended light hours during winter by turning on the incandescent light when needed and must turn the light off and close the shutters when necessary. The zero crossing rate can be used to ignore other loud sources of noise such as thunder. For the prototype only magnitude will be used.Other requirements: Log the number of crows in an hour and upload to a PC periodically to see if the crow rate or average crow magnitude changes over time.Comments:1. Attached are two pdf files. The first, coop-ctrl-concept.pdf, is what I based the parts list on. However, I began to realize that there was far too much work for me to achieve in a reasonable amount of time and I havesimplified my design to the diagram in pdf number two, coop-simplified.pdf.2. I probably need to add a photosensor so the device knows whether it is bright out or not.