Project-based Teaching of Students with Development of a Smart Control of the Free Range Chicken House

This paper describes an example of project-based teaching of students in engineering courses, oriented in automation and control, IoT and development of smart systems. In classical types of teaching students are the passive side and are expected to memorize the information presented by the lecturers. Project-based learning provokes thinking and helps motivate learners. An exemplary solution is described by a student team that developed, together with a teacher, a system for monitoring environmental indicators inside and outside a room for raising chickens and for controlling the door of the room according to the light outside. Blynk is used as a development platform for the software part of the system. A general architecture of hardware modules of the system, circuit diagram and screens of the software subsystem are presented. Working on the project helped the students a lot to become more confident and ambitious, successfully solving the small tasks of the project motivated them to finish it on time.