thanks for all the information on how you do your chicken chores. Just to reassure you, it's a backup plan for when I am travelling. 10, 15 days. For these days they have to stay in. I am working on watering system which cleans itself every day, indeed it gets dirty. I thought about the Pi. I got the impression than if power runs out, it shuts down and the problem is how to restart it again on (solar) power returning? This is what stopped me. Plus that I was not satisfied that connecting a GSM modem (sim card etc.) to it would be troublefree.