I have built a hay feeder which works (or should work?) by essentially having trap doors with hay on them and they are held up by servos. When the alarm triggers the servo it moves out of the way and the door falls allowing the hay to fall with it to where the horses can get it. Each day (mon thru sat) should trigger an alarm causing the servo to move and it is reset on Sunday and refilled with hay. The beginning of the code moves the servos so you can reset the doors one by one.
I am using a ds3231 to keep time and I do not have the cr1220 battery installed in it. From what I understand it should work without it and I am powering the arduino with a 6v battery so I'm not worried about a loss of power. One issue that I'm not worried about is that whenever the arduino is reset, it forgets what time it is if I forward slash out setting the time (//settime). Using it this way makes it think its sunday 5pm everytime its reset. If I do forwardslash it out the arduino thinks its Jan 1, 2000. I don't think that's the issue but I figure its worth mentioning. I'm resetting it with an external push button switch wired to the reset pin.
I know that if I don't reset it at exactly 5pm on sunday the time will be off but the alarm triggers aren't working at all once the arduino is left for a day. If I go in just to troubleshoot and make the alarm trigger at 5:01pm on sunday (giving it just enough time to run the setup code after being reset) the alarm will work and the servo moves. If I reset it and leave it for a day or two the servos never move.
HAY_FEEDER_W_RTC_servo.ino (5.99 KB)