What's under the hood of Mother Hen — for the people who want to know.
The Coop Controller and the Climate Sensor are built around ESP32-S3 microcontrollers — a low-power, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capable SoC widely used in industrial IoT. Cellular connectivity is provided by the Walter module, an open-source LTE-M / NB-IoT cellular modem designed for battery-friendly device-to-cloud links. The Controller is housed in a weather-resistant enclosure for indoor coop use.
Mother Hen runs on AWS. Devices connect to AWS IoT Core over TLS-encrypted MQTT; telemetry, alerts, and configuration flow through AWS Lambda for processing, and customer and device state are stored in DynamoDB. The serverless architecture means there are no servers to patch and the platform scales with the customer base without per-coop infrastructure cost.
The customer portal is a web app served from AWS — open it in any modern browser on your phone, tablet, or computer. There is no app to install, no app-store account to maintain, and no platform lock-in. You log in, see your coop, and customize alerts.
All device-to-cloud connections use TLS with per-device certificates provisioned at the factory and rotated by AWS IoT Core. Firmware updates are cryptographically signed and verified by the device before installation; an unsigned or tampered image is rejected. Customer accounts are protected by Amazon Cognito with optional multi-factor authentication.
