How Could I do This? Motor to open and close doors on a timer?

[atl944]

How Could I do This? Motor to open and close doors on a timer??

Hey Guys,

First post here, and I am picking my brain on how I could accomplish this. Here's what I have.
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/2835/doora.jpg

Wow...Sucky computer drawing. That is a 8' x 3' piece of plywood and the small square are little doors that are on a track to slide up. I have a dowel with wire connected to each door that runs the width of the top of the plywood, with some wire wrapped around that. So in essence, when I unwind the wire the doors slide open.

Now, this is for ventilation purposes (there is going to be a fan blowing into the center square) and I am not always home...So I was wondering if there was a way for me to use this with a pulley system or an electric winch type system that would allow me to set a timer of some sort to open the doors at say 10:00 A.M and close them at 10:00 P.M...

Is this even possible?

Thanks in advance.

matt

 

[BenchTop]

There must be a hundred ways that are cheap and trivial.
You can get as elaborate as you'd like, too- incorporating temperature or humidity sensing can also be done cheap and dirty.

At the extreme low end: battery powered clock guts which are sold for making clocks, with 2 contacts installed in the plastic face that get wiped by the hour hand can send the signal to switch a motor winding all 5 wires. A flipflop sets direction of the motor and a contact on each end of travel signals to cut power.

You can get various kinds of timers from a home depot made for switching sprinklers or appliances at slightly higher expense and less hacking fun.

 

[Mech_Engineer]

There are definitely many ways you could do this. I would first do some looking around to see if you could utilize something like a sprinkler timer and some simple motors to do the job. If not, then you can get more elaborate; it will only be limited by your budget.

Keep in mind there are probably off-the shelf fans that would also fit the bill for you, they run a timers and could just be paired with a set of louvers that open when the fan(s) are on.