It's been a little over a month since the student in Warsaw deployed one of these and despite freezing temps and lots of snow the thing has been working fine. It does get clogged with snow build-up though, so a small resistive heater on the plarform is a good idea if you are doing this when there is a lot of snow.

I experimented with dispenser designs that could reliably dispense unshelled peanuts. The one I landed on is just a simplified version of the shelled peanut dispenser. One baffle at a 10-15 degree angle, one vibrating plate with an opening on one side. It works pretty well, and would allow me to deploy it where feeding pigeons is prohibited since pigeons can't eat unshelled peanuts and can't figure put how to open them. The larger openings makes keeping it rodent-proof a challenge. The dispense tube went from 32mm to 50mm. A rat or small squirrel could get in there and cause problems. I'll have to think of a solution for that.

In an effort to make this a more useful research tool I designed a new PCB that relies on external GPIO to work. Sadly, no 555's in this one, but the BOM is smaller (44 components including headers) and so is the footprint (6.5x6.8cm including sensors). This should make it easier to build and install, and you can use prety much any microcontroller, development board, ot SBC to control and monitor it.

It's not fully baked yet - I will create a version tag after I get one made and teseted.

https://github.com/src1138/VMFB-MC

Current Schematic

Current PCB

Board Dimensions: 65x68mm

Front

Back

BOM

Component Count: 44

Total BOM cost for all electronic components including a Raspberry Pi Zero W, 8GB micro-SD card, a wide-angle camera module, PIR sensor, a motor and a terminal strip (to make the vibration motor) cost €59.62 at Mouser (not  the cheapest place, but while I'm in the Dallas area for the holidays delivery is next day). Jumper wires (36x F/F) are not included in this BOM, but cost around €6 in most cases. The PCB will cost about €7 per board at PCBWay.

Here is the Mouser cart (minus some non-informative columns).

I hope to have one of these built and tested in January. I will prototype it with a Rasperry Pi Zero W and add the code for this to the repo, too.