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Open Source Farming Robot
- donw 5y agoIt’s not very “open source” when your datasets aren’t available for download (unless that has changed?)
- codingdave 5y agoI wish I could like this idea, but their price is pretty steep for how small of an area they cover. Their ROI page is all about the cost of growing your own veggies vs. store-bought, but that misses the mark(et). Bots like this do not compete with stores, they compete with your own manual labor to DIY. And the labor to grow some veggies (especially in a raised garden box) is not that painful. They would be better served focusing on this as an accessibility device, allowing people to garden who do not have the physical capability to otherwise do so.
- jasondozell 5y agoAgree. Long-run, a drone type machine may well become successful (flying around zapping weeds) but this is way over-engineered for what it does.
- bobiny 5y agoDrones are fun, but there might be no need to fight weeds so much. They help plants get stronger and kill off weak ones. Farms are overrun with pests and weeds because ecosystem is incomplete and natural cycles are not followed. Some type of permaculture approach like Fukuoka farming could be a more robust alternative to zapping.
- bobiny 5y agoI think humans moving further from soil is unhealthy in the long run, but this looks fun, like a reverse farming simulator.
- junon 5y agoWhy?
- bobiny 5y agoWhy unhealthy?
- junon 5y agoYes, sorry should have been more clear.
- bobiny 5y agoNp, this https://qz.com/993258/dirt-has-a-microbiome-and-it-may-double-as-an-antidepressant/ https://qz.com/993258/dirt-has-a-microbiome-and-it-may-doubl... And in general it's about being close to nature. Traveling between a flat and an office, sitting in metal or concrete boxes and connecting via messengers is a surrogate or a simulation of life. Again, can be fun, but gotta step outside once in a while, touch plants, smell the living air.
- d--b 5y agoGrowing your own veggies requires an awful lot of time, so barely anybody does it. If this robot allows people with little time to grow vegetables in their backyard, you can argue that they will move closer to soil rather than further...
- bobiny 5y agoAgree, I haven't thought of that.
- jasondozell 5y agoThat’s not that true and the robot will hardly help. The reason people don’t do it is that commercial farming is so efficient once you factor in costs growing your own is not cheaper than buying from supermarket.
- swiley 5y agoThat's interesting, it's a large CNC machine and not a mobile robot. That makes sense.
- WJW 5y agoDoes it? The current construction severely limits the scale at which it could operate, so it will run out of work to do pretty quickly. That means it'll be idle most of the time. If you have a similar complexity robot but mobile, it could be trucking around a much larger field.
- swiley 5y agoI don't think most people want to turn their yard into a serious farm. This is great for backyard gardens. I'd get a smaller table top version for my apartment.
- cube2222 5y agoYeah, I too wonder how small you can currently get with the smallest Express version they offer. I'd love to get something like this into my apartment, around 0.5x1 meters in size, and with a refillable water tank.
- oxymoran 5y agoNo it’s still pretty useless. If you want a legitimate backyard garden, the rain gutter grow system is the way to go. No robot, no electricity, no weeding, automated watering.
- swiley 5y agoTBH for my indoor garden watering it by hand is fine (really good for my mental health honestly) I just like the idea of playing with the robot.
- kortex 5y agoAre you talking about the system where you put buckets above a rain gutter which has a float valve to set the level? E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyOIRVjatdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyOIRVjatdg That's actually quite clever! Though I'm not sure how they avoid the gutters from turning into algae blooming, mosquito-breeding cesspools. :p Edit: Oh I guess you can just cover the gutter in plastic and ensure there is enough water throughput to stay fairly fresh: https://permaculturefoodforest.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/rain-gutter-grow-system/ https://permaculturefoodforest.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/rain...
- taylorfinley 5y agoI know cnc and farming, and I really don't see this product surviving. I can't find a shovel that lasts more than a few months on my small farm, I don't know how a big 3d printer is going to cut it in anything like real agricultural conditions. I would love to be wrong though, garden robots would be great, especially if they had lasers for slugs. Actually, forget the rest of the robot, all I really want is a slug laser.
- foxhop 5y agoSlug lazers ~= small flock of ducks
- schmorptron 5y agoAh, biological warfare.
- lb0 5y agoNot species-appropriate usually without enough roaming space and a lake .. so not for everyone :( Btw, did I see the robot harvesting in the end? Everything else is fine, but at least this don't take away from me! :>
- zajio1am 5y agoFrom what i heard, they usually destroy every green on you garden first and only after that turn to slugs.
- bserge 5y agoHens would be less destructive, I think.
- thepete2 5y agoI don't have much garden experience, and I could possibly imagine this thing surviving in a greenhouse. But on the outside I agree with you, at the least there will be some intervention required.
- wildpeaks 5y agothe finger on the monkey paw curls your slugs now shoot lasers
- foxhop 5y agoThis isn't how food grows. It doesn't require a robot. Source: I grow food at home and share how on this YouTube channel - https://youtu.be/q3sR5wJwJoo https://youtu.be/q3sR5wJwJoo
- jasondozell 5y agoNo doubt the tech is interesting but conceptually this is pretty awful. Anyone who has done it knows if you have irrigation sorted there is very little needed for seedlings to grow to full size. Even with no irrigation we’re only talking 5mins watering on dry days. Adding all this electronics and metal to an otherwise organic and natural process is environmentally, economically and spiritually detrimental.
- sgt 5y agoI thought the same. Why not just sort out an automated irrigation system, and do the initial seeding manually? Even with a robot there will be manual work like cleaning weeds, pruning, etc.
- justsomeperson 5y agoweeding and pest control is where the real utility for a farm robot would come in.
- sgt 5y agoYes, good point. Does this open source farm robot spray pesticide?
- KaiserPro 5y agoShouldn't need too, if you know where you've planted then you can kill any plant that's growing in an unknown place. For all the other types of pest, you really don't want to be automatically spraying that, you're one software bug away from having a very bad day.
- opinologo 5y agoIf that's the case then plastics from your irrigation system would also ruin your environment. Metals (although in tiny portions) are part of ourselves but plastics are not.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- max_likelihood 5y agoFrom what I can see, this just waters the plants? Is there any weed control (e.g. spraying with super-heated Clove oil)?
- malloryerik 5y agoThis uses Elixir with the Nerves IoT platform. Jose Valim blogged about it last year: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/08/20/embedded-elixir-at-farmbot/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/08/20/embedded-elixir-at-f...
- mytailorisrich 5y agoFrom the video, I'm puzzled why they would water plants with a robotic nozzle spraying on the plant/leaves. Watering works better the way it does now: run a pipe along the plants and water the soil.
- bobiny 5y agoLeaves probably want some moisture too. If you run pipes straight to the stem you'll have to rearrange them each time you changes here individual plants are which is harder to automate.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoWell, my understanding (and common advice) is actually not to water the leaves at all if possible as that has no benefit apart from helping diseases set in.
- bserge 5y agoDepends on the plant. Leaves absorb water, too, fwiw.
- bobiny 5y agoYou can damage the plant if you water leaves in bright sunshine, because water will act as a lens and leaves will get burned. Otherwise I'd follow nature: plants get water when it rains, so leaves should have some water too.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- catmanjan 5y agoWhat if you had a robot gantry that could attach itself to existing centre pivot systems to do seeding and tillage?
- kortex 5y agoBrilliant take. Especially if you use some sort of roller-coaster-tire style mechanism vs linear ways, which just aren't going to stay aligned. It would need a position and feedback system outside of the current "servo and home position" method, because even with closed loop motors, the distance traversed isn't exact. We need a cheap, easy way to get accurate-ish absolute position (1-3cm), maybe acoustics and phase-based?
- kortex 5y agoI've built robots. I've built greenhouses. I like software and the occasional bit of farming. Thirs looks cute and fun, and I hope they iterate, but it's not really solving the right problems, and introduces its own. 1 - there are no straight lines on a farm. Maybe in a hydro setup built on concrete slab, in which case, why robot? 2 - needs a way to cover more ground. If it's not able to travel linearly indefinitely in one direction along a bed, there's no way to scale. 3 - grit. Precision CnC mechanisms and dirt do not mix. You can't keep farm things clean (unless hydro, and even then, things get wet and caked with fertilizer salt) Ditch the linear ways for something like bike tires. There's an open source solar farm robot which rolls around weeding (can't find at the moment, maybe was a video). Not limited by a box. They need robust mechanisms which can stand up to farm abuse and are easy to service, grease, and replace (unless you hermetically seal the components, which is harder than it sounds). Weeds are actually pretty easy to manage. If someone wants to make an impact in the farm tech space, come up with a cheaper alternative for scooping and dumping dirt. A ride-on tractor can be had used for $500-800. But as soon as you start talking loaders, it's $2-3000 used, and tens of thousands for new. Also the smallest tend to be a 4 foot wide bucket and a few hundred pounds lift. I want something half or a quarter of that. Able to scoop 50 lbs of dirt, repeatedly, and dig holes/trenches. That would have a massive impact in agrarian communities around the world.
- bobiny 5y agoThis is a for small hipster raised bed farming in back yard. Maybe it doesn't have to scale to a size of a commercial farm
- mikepurvis 5y agoAs a fellow backyard raised bed hipster, part of the point for me is going out and tending it. I struggle to see the value in this unless it’s about scaling.
- lifty 5y agoYou will tend the robot instead.
- sublimefire 5y agoThe only missing thing to this is a gun. To automatically shoot at random animals interested in your garden.
- PopePompus 5y agoYes, planting, watering and weeding are the easy parts. Keeping deer, birds, rabbits and raccoons from eating everything is a much bigger issue, in my experience.
- mikro2nd 5y agoMobile electric fencing is your friend, here. No need for guns.
- cube2222 5y agoI wonder if it would be viable to set this (their Express version) up on a 1x0.5m table in an apartment. I'd love something like this, and with a refillable water tank.
- oxymoran 5y agoI don’t get it, what does it do? Automatically water plants? You can do that with a sub irrigated planter with zero electricity and achieve fantastic yields.
- wjaugustyn 5y agoVery cool, but they should market it for what it is -- backyard farming for people that like automation. Large scale farming is pretty damn automated already. We can probably really improve on pesticide use, soil health, pollination etc (things that relate to optimising the ecological interactions between organisms).
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y agoWould be useful to see some performance metrics, and, service history. How much produce is produced? How much time spent cleaning, repairing, or otherwise keeping it running What preventive maintenance is required? i.e., other than a learning tool, if you just consider the small garden users, what's the return?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ehnto 5y agoI would recommend against the CSS transform the website has on the YouTube videos, that's degrading performance by a margin and is really not worth it. Also there's no scrollbar at all, that's super silly.
- williesleg 5y agoWhat about all the illegals? Replacing them with robots? How racist!
- fit2rule 5y agoThe farm is the robot: permaculture.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoI had a friend reach out to me, because his dad is a farmer and needed a programmer to work on his tractors, or something like that. I gave him some suggestions such as posting upwork, and fverr. I would hate to be in his position. I don't see anyone with the required electrical engineering background, willing to work on a one off project for a farmer. As far as I know, he did not find anyone.
- stingrae 5y agoout of curiosity, what did he need done and how much was he offering? I do think the kind of SWE you need for that kind of job is unlikely to hang out on fiverrr or upwork.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoI don't know the exact details. But I can find out, if you know someone that might be interested in such a project. "My dad, who I copied on this email had a quick question regarding hiring a programmer to write a small program for a farm equipment control system" is what I responded to.
- gpm 5y agoYou're on a forum filled with bored software engineers, posting details right here is a pretty good idea ;) If contract work isn't against the rules for them (not sure), and the job is otherwise reasonable (feasible, not too open ended, not throwing up giant red flags) I bet he would get some bites by posting to the monthly "who is hiring" threads too. Depending on the details of the request I might be willing to do it, more because I think it might be interesting to work on a "farm equipment control system" than anything else. Coincidentally I gave notice at my job a week ago so I'll have some free time coming up.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoOkay, great. I just emailed him to find out if he hired someone. If he hasn't if there a way to private message on here? I can forward your contact info to him.
- swiftcoder 5y agoI'm genuinely confused by this whole pitch. What practical problem does this solve? Planting seeds in a bed that size is at most an hour or two of work. Raised beds don't suffer from that many weeds, so weeding is a couple of hours per week at most. And drip irrigation with a timer can be had for a few dollars.
- ducttapecrown 5y agoThis solves the practical problem of having a single robot that can plant, weed and water a raised bed. Looking through their twitter posts linked on the website, they've good a bunch of happy users .
- xgulfie 5y ago"having a robot" is not a problem statement
- gtyras2mrs 5y ago> "having a robot" is not a problem statement It is if what you want is a robot.
- timbre1234 5y agoLook: if they aren't using lasers to shoot the weeds, I'm not interested.
- sklargh 5y agoOther people will love this but the analog nature of gardening is what keeps me interested. This sort of ruins the meditative joy I get out of the hobby. But if Homelab + Dirt = awesome to you, more power to you.
- adolph 5y agoMaybe this product is an April fools joke gone Theranos? The first thing I noticed was the overhead water sprayer, which is a SFG anti-pattern. Avoid overhead watering with automatic sprinkler systems. Those systems are designed for large areas (like lawns) that need a broad application of water, not your Square Foot Garden that’s designed to take up little space. The overhead spray never gets to the root zone beneath your plants’ leaves, so the watering winds up being insufficient. That overhead spray also quickly evaporates, leading to water waste, and leaves foliage wet which can lead to pest and disease issues. https://squarefootgardening.org/2020/05/watering-methods-for-your-square-foot-garden/ https://squarefootgardening.org/2020/05/watering-methods-for...
- deeviant 5y agoOh hey this is my industry (robots in agriculture). I don't like this. It feels way too "Juicero" to me. Too cute, to inconsequential. It feels likely one would spend more time on building and maintaining this thing than work it actually saves and a significant amount the benefit of having a garden is working it with you hands and watching that work grow in fruition. Bots in the farm though, they are the real deal. Reducing herbicide use by 80% or more, allowing the use of non-GMO crop while maintaining strong weed control and healthy crop, treating and optimizing every individual plant in a field, all things that will happen in the next 10 years due to robotics in the farm.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoIf you're willing to share, I'd be interested in knowing who you work for...
- deeviant 5y agoI work for Blue River Technology, now fully owned by John Deere. Obligatory: Any opinions I express on HN are my own and not representative of my employer.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoI’m curious what you think of our approach. Still early but the machine is outside in the fields and even on the shortest day of the year it traveled 20km on solar power. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27634450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27634450
- deeviant 5y agoI think that looks a lot more like the right direction. I would say that the precision part of Ag robotics is the most important part and the success of this project is likely going to be resting on that entirely. It boils down to something like: 1. Can you sense and classify (i.e. Deep learning based vision) 2. After that, can you turn a pixel into field coordinates. (Pose-> gps/encoder/imu/etc) 3. Can you act accurately/quick/effectively enough (kill/treat mechanism, electromechnical design) Then it's can you do it reliably enough. Then it's can you do it fast enough. Then its can you do it cost effectively enough. Farmers won't mess with anything not reliable. They generally aren't interested in anything with worse performance than existing processes, even if greener/cheaper (unless they are significantly so). They most especially will not mess with anything that doesn't generate value in their eyes and they are very good at understanding what generates value and what doesn't.
- carapace 5y agoThe website trips one of my major heuristics for caution: it doesn't say who is behind it. There's no "about us" section (that I could see, maybe it's there and I missed it?)
- solomonb 5y agoI do a lot of home gardening. In my front yard I have four 10x5' raised beds for annuals. I setup drip tape on a timer and mulch with straw. Beyond that I do almost zero work to maintain the plants. Occasional weeding when I see weeds starting to crowd out a productive plant and certain plants need to be pruned to form. I really can't see the value add from adding a CNC machine to each raised bed.
- maxwelljoslyn 5y agoPaging TaylorAlexander... what's your take?
- sfgweilr4f 5y agoThe very definition of hacking applied to gardening. I think we need more agricultural robotics. This is a useful beginning and its been iterating for few years. Good stuff. Some of the complaints about linear garden beds is just not valid. Different crops can definitely be linear, even grid-like. This idea can be scaled up with increasing complexity as needed. It will be interesting to see where this kind of idea goes as the projects themselves itself grow up.
- arduinomancer 5y agoLooks cool but the cost/time to set this up seems way overkill for how small the plots are. The smallest kit is $1500 USD. The watering seems like the actual place where time could be saved but that could be accomplished with a basic automatic sprinkler.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoMy brother showed me this, a couple of years ago. Cool stuff.
- rmah 5y agoPretty cool, but isn't that more a gardening robot than a farm robot? I wonder how it handles weeding chores...
- maxioatic 5y agoHappy to see this get some attention! I've been following it for the last 6ish years, and it's been cool to see their progress. I think a few commenters are missing the point of this project. It's not a commercial robot and it's not meant to mass produce food. It seems maybe the use the word "farm" is being taken too literally. Their four stated applications are: 1. Education 2. Home use 3. Research 4. Accessibility This is the description from their white paper [0]: > The vision of this project is to create an open and accessible technology aiding everyone to grow food and to grow food for everyone. The mission is to grow a community that produces free and open-source hardware plans, software, data, and documentation enabling everyone to build and operate a farming machine. [0] - https://farm.bot/blogs/news/the-farmbot-whitepaper https://farm.bot/blogs/news/the-farmbot-whitepaper
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoThat video is so over the top it feels like a movie trailer for a summer blockbuster, complete with dramatic action music and the “take back control” slogan. Things like that make it harder to trust.
- diydsp 5y agothe popups in the bottom left announcing people purchasing them in the past are so distracting I couldn't watch this or trust it. Even the big travel websites shed that awful attempt at social proof. They even give away their own game: > or simply impress your friends and neighbors with a quick demo
- lxe 5y agoThis is a cool concept, and probably can be applied to some sort of specific farm design, but I kinda feel like there's a better way to implement some parts of this. Drip irrigation for watering and fertilizing comes to mind, which really is a better solution and prevents the need to water directly onto the leaves of the plant, which is a huge no-no to a lot of plants.
- matthewfelgate 5y ago* sudo apt install farmbot * farmbot --sew strawberries * farmbot --pick straweberries
- RyanGoosling 5y agoIt's cool in a technical way, but is it practical? I think drip irrigation is more practical. Or other irrigation methods other than water over canopy.