Omlet Smart Autodoor Battery Life Woes

My Omlet Smart Automatic Chicken Coop Door has been doing its thing nicely over the summer and I have been pretty happy with it. As automatic chicken coop doors go, it’s pretty well decked out.

It opens and closes according to a preset schedule. You can also set it to dynamically follow the sun, by virtue of its built-in light sensor. The “smart” moniker refers to its WiFi connectivity and associated app. You can power it with 4 AA batteries (which is what I do), or wire it up to AC. Quite dandy indeed.

Until a few months ago.

Rapid Battery Drain#

Every now and then, the physical controls turn out to be dead, with only fresh batteries resolving the situation. After about a week, the issue would resurface, and eventually the door failed to open in the morning at the scheduled time. Once I found out, the chickens were quite distraught.

This went on for a couple of cycles before I realized what was going on.

The last failure occurred during an early winter cold snap, which led me to believe the Duracell batteries I had been using were to blame. Standard Alkaline batteries don’t perform well in cold conditions, so I got some Energizer Lithium AA batteries.

To. No. Avail.

Botched Firmware Updates#

It must have been my developer background that put me on the right track to the real culprit.

How many software updates does an automatic chicken coop door need, really?!

Let’s have a gander together, shall we?

• v1.0.15 – (Released 2024-02-27): Resolved issue with Discovery Mode not exiting properly, resulting in wifi remaining active and draining the battery
• v1.0.16 – (Released 2024-03-16): Removed reboot if wifi connection fails – control panel will now sleep and retry on the next wake cycle – constant reboot was causing battery drain
• v1.0.35 (Released 2024-07-22): Resolved issue with Discovery Mode not exiting properly leading to battery drain due to sleep not starting
• v1.0.47 (Released 2025-02-28): Resolved issue with control panels (particularly in Notification Only mode) not sleeping as long as they should, and thus consuming more battery than expected
• v1.0.50 (Released 2025-07-17): Resolved issue with batteries draining quickly when wifi is enabled, but unavailable
• v1.0.51 (Released 2025-08-29): Resolved further issue with batteries draining quickly when wifi is enabled, but unavailable
• v1.0.53 (Released 2025-10-18): Resolved further issue with batteries draining quickly when unable to connect to the Omlet servers

Testing In Production#

The people at Omlet clearly have issues with getting the power management right. They released at least 7 updates related to battery drain over a prolonged 1.5 year time span.

From the outside looking in, it appears they were unable to pinpoint the exact issue, and were perhaps using production telemetry data to narrow it down.

For me, this reeks of “testing in production”. While I can sympathize, this is not the way to treat embedded software that controls physical hardware in the real world!

Revert to “dumb mode”#

The solution I settled on was to

• factory reset the device, and
• set it up without a WiFi connection

This effectively turns the device into its dumber, slightly cheaper non-wifi-enabled counterpart, with no app-based monitor or control.

And I will be leaving it this way, as I’ve lost trust in Omlet’s ability to fix it.