Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Gardening Robot 'FarmBot' Raises $560,000
Slashdot reader Paul Fernhout writes: FarmBot is an open-source gantry-crane-style outdoor robot for tending a garden bed. The project is crowdfunding a first production run and has raised US$561,486 of their US$100,000 goal -- with one day left to go... The onboard control system is based around a Raspberry Pi 3 computer and an Arduino Mega 2560 Microcontroller. Many of the parts are 3D printable.
Two years ago Slashdot covered the genesis of this project, describing its goal as simply "to increase food production by automating as much of it as possible."
Two years ago Slashdot covered the genesis of this project, describing its goal as simply "to increase food production by automating as much of it as possible."
...Many of the *plants* are 3D printable..."
Now I'm hungry again.
FarmBot... For Gardeners Too Lazy To Garden (TM)
#DeleteChrome
Seems like any time I see a crowd sourced idea that makes good $. Then goes belly up before production and someone walks away with a bag ($ on the side) full of cash
I, for one, welcome our new garden-tending robot overlords.
No seriously, this could be a good thing. I like how precisely it plants and waters each seed. That could produce high efficiency.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Planting seeds? I plant literally a couple dozen square meters in minutes and while spot watering/fertilizing may be slightly more efficient in watering over a sprinkler, it's not going to do much over a buried drip system. And almost all of the time gardening (>99%) is spent on weeding which is not even a problem on a raised bed/processed commercial setup as this. Also not addressed (because it looks like they use pre-mixed soil from miracle grow) is the processing of real soil - tilling it up and removing rocks. I think an autonomous lawn tractor with an intelligent implement of destruction would be much more practical and also cheaper/lower maintenance.
Unless you're a total spaz you can grow more than that manually with less combined time than even putting the damned thing together.
I have looked at this several times. No way this thing can survive being outside 24/7/365. It's not waterproof where it counts, it needs a whole lot of refinement to make it to an actual 1.0 release device that can last outside through all types of weather for at least 3-4 years. The gantry is not self cleaning or sealed in any way, same for the tracks.
It's a great idea. and a fantastic early beta. but they need some industrial robotics guys to show them how to make it survive weather.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I hope this thing is happy being fueled by cheap polluting sources and doesn't clog much. Just with clean water the current politics of 3rd world nations makes access to fuel sources difficult. But it could be very useful to roof-top first-world herb gardens and space travel.
One common plan to colonize Mars, the Moon or various science fiction worlds starts with dropping of robots and letting them build the infrastructure. Then all you need to send humans is a fancy taxi with some really good entertainment for the long trip. One problem facing these plans is that the cost estimates. One NASA plan to research, develop and implement the robotic parts of a farm on the Moon has a literal Moon-shot price.
Yet here we are in the age of Kickstarter and Indiegogo funding where the key parts of a space colony are being invented one piece at a time.
Let's just hope that nobody decides to take the money and go build a house with it instead. That would be just Peachy.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
Can it farm raspberries? And can it bake pies?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Most of their video was about how you can do lots and lots of work to put it together and get it working properly. It would take way less time to just study gardening on the internet and tend your own garden, or less money to just buy the food. They know this, which is why they emphasize and re-emphasize having perfect control over how your food is grown. I don't know bout you but I couldn't give a toss what soil moisture my lettuce had between days 2 and 10 of growth.
Don't get me wrong, I love the can-do maker and hacker culture. Just don't confuse it with productivity. This technology will be ready for the world when it actually takes less time and money to grow one's own food with the bot.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
If it's not mobile it seems to be very expensive to just plant seeds and water an extremely small area.
The seeds could probably be planted more quickly by hand than the time it takes to program the machine
to do it.
And then using it for watering seems overkill. Even if you want to automate watering I see automated sprinkler
systems available at amazon for a couple of hundred bucks.
So it looks like the machine would spend most of its time just sitting there not doing anything.
I suppose the weeding is somewhat useful. But again it's a very small area.
Or am I missing something obvious?
What do you mean? Works fine for me.
Sent from my iPhone
Can none of these hipsters run a lathe or a milling machine? Can no one measure, or make a part square or plumb?
The parts you are talking about need injection molding. Making the molds would probably be cost prohibitive to the project. I am sure they could be machined, but then they might get too heavy for the gantry.
Can none of these hipsters run a lathe or a milling machine?
Why? Because it is supposed to be hard? For most of the parts they are making, 3D printing is superior in every way. Less material, less time, less training, less effort, less waste.
Disclaimer: I know how to run a lathe and CNC milling machine, and have a Sherline in my garage. But I also know how to select the right tool for the job.
When clicking on the genesis link
Farmbot fails the KISS philosophy miserably. There are hundreds of unique ways this system could fail and I doubt its longevity in an outdoor setting. I do container planting in something called a sub-irrigated planter. Using a mulch cover, weeds are controlled without the need for a camera to identify good vs bad plants and a robotic arm to remove them. This also helps control the temperature of the soil, something farmbot cannot do.
The design of the sub-irrigation system means you have a tank of water under the dirt in the same container and a screen to keep the dirt from contacting the water. That is except for a small spot in the corner so the dirt is irrigated from below using capillary action. The dirt is always uniformly moist but not sodden and it is easy to water, simply fill the tank. To prevent over-filling of the tank, make a hole in the container before the screen holding the dirt away from the water. You can automate watering using a $20 timer without the need for a robotic arm and a moisture sensor.
You can build these containers for around $20 and 2-3 hours of your time or purchase them commercially for $50. The only thing you must do yourself that farmbot does for you is plant seeds, which is a small task on the suburban/urban garden scale and something you only have to do one to two times per planting season. This is in contrast to the thousands of dollars it takes to build a farmbot, plus the many hours of assembly and testing.
Not to mention farmbot requires monthly maintenance (tightening of screws), something a container does not require. To winter a farmbot, it requires complete disassembly. At least I wouldn't trust all those components to a harsh northern winter. To winter a container, cut your plants, drain the reservoir, and throw a cover over it. Done in 2 minutes.
Yeah it's a cool project to build and get working and I like that it is open source. However, you can achieve nearly the same thing in a less impressive but far more economical and fool-proof manner. They make big claims of how little energy it uses and how easy it is to go off-grid. My container uses a single AA battery per season (in the watering timer). Back when I started this 5 years ago, I just remembered to fill the reservoirs when I got home from work, so it required zero energy. An urban/suburban garden shouldn't require any energy use.
TL;DR Farmbot is a classic example of working harder and not smarter.
And to add to the confusion, I recently used some nice wall-mount brackets for iPads.
These were not injection molded, per se. And they weren't 3D printed.
These were milled from thick, injection-molded plastic. The tool marks were obvious on the hidden side of the thing.
So now, we've got one more method to produce low volume parts to consider.
Discuss.
Kid-proof tablet..
Interesting that it needs to be internet connected as well to run the planting. I could see this for keeping a running total of people using the farmbot bust just registering something would have been fine. "Internet â" FarmBot can only be programmed and controlled using the web application, meaning an active internet connection is required to send and receive data."
Indeed, the technical details on my firefox (26.0) say:
www.build.slashdot.org uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.slashdot.org , slashdot.org
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)
Seems a bug to me as '*' should match with 'www.build'.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
... either I'd be one of the millions who didn't get a spot in a Vault, or I'd most likely be a feral ghoul. And while Super Mutants have green thumbs, they also have green pinkies, green hands, and green faces.
Or, you know, the atom bombs would knock me into an entirely different dimension where the Mr Handy was never invented.
Besides, it's a good 60 years to 2077. I'd be dead of simple old age, if I wasn't ghoulified.
Looks like they erroneously added www. to the front. They have a wildcard cert for *.slashdot.org but the www.build does not match (wildcards only go one level in domain certs). If you remove the www. from the beginning of the link it works fine. Might explain why it works on the other person's phone as well - mobile version might link differently.
No, wildcard certs only go one level (See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc281...).
Rather than pay $3000,
Can I just download the plans for this open source farmbot and build it?
If not, which parts are open source, and which are not?
Obvious question....
Can it grow weed?
Venezuelan hipster socialists trying to get out of being forced to work in the fields
At the cost it currently sells for (i.e. just under $3000 and apparently $4000 once the 25% off offer runs out), I doubt that it's gonna be a smash hit in the developing world. Obviously currently aimed at the first world, where food security is arguably a non-issue.
BUT: many low-labour, water-saving and biomass-recycling manual gardening methods do exist and do feed people with abundant, nutritious and fresh produce. Even in the third world, believe it or not.
Targeted watering seems to be this robot's main selling point, but I think I can buy a LOT of water from my municipality for $3K, applied via hoses and micro-sprayers by opening a tap for some minutes maybe once or twice a week (500-600mm per year rainfall in my locale). Oh, one can get timers to do that too (just take them off before freezing weather sets in...).
Targeted weeding: I don't know, when I go to get something from my veg garden, I may spend around 5 mins pulling some weeds by hand as I go along the beds. One tends to get them small when done say once a week or so... Not backbreaking (raised beds and uncompacted soil), actually relaxing and adding to the pleasure of gardening as I'm actually getting outside a bit.
Mind, I've been gardening like this for the 3rd year now, so I believe I'm past the wide-eyed enthusiasm stage and have a good feel for how things work in general. (And yes, brown cardboard really works wonders suppressing unwanted plants and keeping moisture in.)
And I do realize that to put something like this robot together won't be cheap, so I'm not actually against this project. But it does look like being aimed at the "affluent hipster's newest toy" segment.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
This thing is not even remotely at the "live in the backyard for a year" level of weatherproofing, etc. Dirt, animals, bugs, residue from evaporation.
If you you want a "backyard" scale operation, you'd be better off optimizing hydroponic systems. More a matter of pumps and valves and less moving parts.
If you want 1 acre scale - what you want is robotic wheeled vehicles (which already exist for 40 acre scale)
Noted. Thanks for pointing that out.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.