Open Source Farming Robot

I&#x27;ve built robots. I&#x27;ve built greenhouses. I like software and the occasional bit of farming. Thirs looks cute and fun, and I hope they iterate, but it&#x27;s not really solving the right problems, and introduces its own.<p>1 - there are no straight lines on a farm. Maybe in a hydro setup built on concrete slab, in which case, why robot?<p>2 - needs a way to cover more ground. If it&#x27;s not able to travel linearly indefinitely in one direction along a bed, there&#x27;s no way to scale.<p>3 - grit. Precision CnC mechanisms and dirt do not mix. You can&#x27;t keep farm things clean (unless hydro, and even then, things get wet and caked with fertilizer salt)<p>Ditch the linear ways for something like bike tires. There&#x27;s an open source solar farm robot which rolls around weeding (can&#x27;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).<p>Weeds are actually pretty easy to manage.<p>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&#x27;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&#x2F;trenches. That would have a massive impact in agrarian communities around the world.

I know cnc and farming, and I really don&#x27;t see this product surviving. I can&#x27;t find a shovel that lasts more than a few months on my small farm, I don&#x27;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.

Oh hey this is my industry (robots in agriculture).<p>I don&#x27;t like this. It feels way too &quot;Juicero&quot; 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.<p>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.

This uses Elixir with the Nerves IoT platform. Jose Valim blogged about it last year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elixir-lang.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;embedded-elixir-at-farmbot&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elixir-lang.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;embedded-elixir-at-f...</a>

Happy to see this get some attention! I&#x27;ve been following it for the last 6ish years, and it&#x27;s been cool to see their progress.<p>I think a few commenters are missing the point of this project. It&#x27;s not a commercial robot and it&#x27;s not meant to mass produce food. It seems maybe the use the word &quot;farm&quot; is being taken too literally. Their four stated applications are:<p>1. Education<p>2. Home use<p>3. Research<p>4. Accessibility<p>This is the description from their white paper [0]:<p>&gt; 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.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farm.bot&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-farmbot-whitepaper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farm.bot&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-farmbot-whitepaper</a>

No doubt the tech is interesting but conceptually this is pretty awful.<p>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.<p>Adding all this electronics and metal to an otherwise organic and natural process is environmentally, economically and spiritually detrimental.

Very 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).

I&#x27;m genuinely confused by this whole pitch. What practical problem does this solve?<p>Planting seeds in a bed that size is at most an hour or two of work. Raised beds don&#x27;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.

Would be useful to see some performance metrics, and, service history.<p>How much produce is produced?<p>How much time spent cleaning, repairing, or otherwise keeping it running<p>What preventive maintenance is required?<p>i.e., other than a learning tool, if you just consider the small garden users, what&#x27;s the return?

I 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.

From the video, I&#x27;m puzzled why they would water plants with a robotic nozzle spraying on the plant&#x2F;leaves. Watering works better the way it does now: run a pipe along the plants and water the soil.

I think humans moving further from soil is unhealthy in the long run, but this looks fun, like a reverse farming simulator.

Maybe 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.<p><i>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.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squarefootgardening.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;watering-methods-for-your-square-foot-garden&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squarefootgardening.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;watering-methods-for...</a>

I 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&#x27;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.

I 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.<p>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.

Other 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.<p>But if Homelab + Dirt = awesome to you, more power to you.

The 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.<p>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.<p>It will be interesting to see where this kind of idea goes as the projects themselves itself grow up.

I do a lot of home gardening. In my front yard I have four 10x5&#x27; 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.<p>I really can&#x27;t see the value add from adding a CNC machine to each raised bed.

This is a cool concept, and probably can be applied to some sort of specific farm design, but I kinda feel like there&#x27;s a better way to implement some parts of this.<p>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.

Pretty cool, but isn&#x27;t that more a <i>gardening</i> robot than a <i>farm</i> robot? I wonder how it handles weeding chores...

What if you had a robot gantry that could attach itself to existing centre pivot systems to do seeding and tillage?

That&#x27;s interesting, it&#x27;s a large CNC machine and not a mobile robot. That makes sense.

Looks cool but the cost&#x2F;time to set this up seems way overkill for how small the plots are.<p>The smallest kit is $1500 USD.<p>The watering seems like the actual place where time could be saved but that could be accomplished with a basic automatic sprinkler.

That 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.

The website trips one of my major heuristics for caution: it doesn&#x27;t say who is behind it. There&#x27;s no &quot;about us&quot; section (that I could see, maybe it&#x27;s there and I missed it?)

It&#x27;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.

I wonder if it would be viable to set this (their Express version) up on a 1x0.5m table in an apartment.<p>I&#x27;d love something like this, and with a refillable water tank.

From what I can see, this just waters the plants? Is there any weed control (e.g. spraying with super-heated Clove oil)?

My brother showed me this, a couple of years ago.<p>Cool stuff.

The only missing thing to this is a gun. To automatically shoot at random animals interested in your garden.

It’s not very “open source” when your datasets aren’t available for download (unless that has changed?)

<p><pre><code> * sudo apt install farmbot * farmbot --sew strawberries * farmbot --pick straweberries</code></pre>

Paging TaylorAlexander... what&#x27;s your take?

Look: if they aren&#x27;t using lasers to shoot the weeds, I&#x27;m not interested.

I would recommend against the CSS transform the website has on the YouTube videos, that&#x27;s degrading performance by a margin and is really not worth it.<p>Also there&#x27;s no scrollbar at all, that&#x27;s super silly.