RFID control / tracking in chicken coop

Projects General Guidance
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Hello! I have some experience with arduino (sensors, motor control) and would like to control a guillotie-style door via rfid or nfd, eg: "../ All chickens inside then close door"
and also monitoring which chicken uses what nesting box (4 boxes), eg: "../ chicken X is in box1" . The center-on-center distance for each box is 16" (to assess possible interference issues).
Based on my initial research, I'm thinking that I'd have to use 1+4 (5 total: 1 for the door, 4 for the nesting boxes.) "sub" arduinos, each with a PN532 shield due to the difficulty of using multiple antenna's with one RFID card PLUS one "Master" arduino to collect the data from each sub.
I need to have rfid tag-specific data from each antenna collected to be transmitted via wifi and ideally, display on iphone.
My thought is that each arduino could transmit the tag data to a "master" arduino via wifi (or wired if easier), something like "SUB21:RFIDTAG001", and then the master arduino would transmit via wifi where the output could be formatted and displayed.
My questions are:

  1. Are the "subs" indeed required for each RFID data collection point(antenna)?
  2. Could I use independent PN532's only and route the output to just the master thereby negating the need for the sub arduino's?
  3. Am I under-appreciating the complexity of this project...or overcomplicating as there might be a selection of more efficient hardware/software options?
    Thank-you for your feedback!
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Only when you begin testing will you know which is true!
Use the PN532 serial port and make the distance to your multi-serial port Arduino board as far as the real installation will be. If the communication doesn't work, you may need to convert to RS-232 at each end of the wiring.

You will need one serial port for each PN532 board, certainly not one Arduino per board.

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