In the front yard of Rory Aronson’s San Luis Obispo home (that he shares with 9 roommates), a robot is tending his garden- seeding, watering, weeding, and testing the soil- while he controls it from his phone. FarmBot is what he calls “humanity’s open-source automated precision farming machine”. https://farmbot.io/
As a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo he was inspired by a guest lecture in his organic agriculture class, “when a traditional farmer came in talking about some of the tractor technology he’s using on his farm and I looked at that and said, ‘Wait a minute, I can do that better’, explains Aronson. “The first thing that I thought of when I thought of the idea was, ‘Oh this probably exists let me go look it up’ and I scoured the Internet. I was amazed actually, that there was not a CNC-type farming equipment already existing so I said, well, I guess it’s up to me.”
During the summer after graduation, Aronson wrote a white paper to outline his ideas and within days he had the attention of “software developers, open-source enthusiasts, ag specialists, mechanical engineers, and more”. After several years of iterations and a crowdfunding campaign that has raised over a million dollars, the FarmBot team (Rory and programmers based worldwide) will release the FarmBot Genesis in early 2017.
Using an Arduino and Raspberry Pi, FarmBots are “giant 3D printers, but instead of extruding plastic, its tools are seed injectors, watering nozzles, sensors, and more.” If you want to print your own, the specs are all free and open-source, but if you’d rather buy an all-inclusive kit, it will cost you $2900, a number Aronson says will come down with time. He sees it as a long-term investment. “Because it’s so based in software, all of the functions, it will get better over time so even if you bought a kit today the hardware won’t change, but the software will allow it to do more and more things over time”.
“My long-term vision for FarmBot is that it’s a home appliance,” explains Aronson. “Just like everyone has a refrigerator and a washing machine and a drier maybe you have a Farmbot too and in the backyard doing its thing and it’s like a utility that you use. You turn on the water on your faucet and water comes out, you go out into your backyard and there’s food that’s been grown for you.”
Original story: https://faircompanies.com/videos/open-source-bot-plants-maintains-your-garden-when-you-cant/
, https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BqYrAWssrrY/hqdefault.jpg
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9:40 Yeah, cool. But you need to have a 3D printer to get theses on the cheap.
FarmBot cost between 1500$-8000$
And it is far from being plug n play.
You should see this as a robot learning experience, not a ROI for low labor vege growing.
But, if you wanna learned about robot, you better buy a DIY 3D printer kit for about 200$ instead.
FUN FACT: All the FarmBot video have their comment section "closed". That's interesting for an open source company isn't?
Reminds me of the CNC Machine
This is pathetic
Wow that is amazing
Did I just hear open source
how do you protect your investment from theft, weather, environment and from plant pests?
I'm speechless. Very elegant design. I'm an EE.
Some Weeds will blocked from view of the Robot, by the leaves of the plants.
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This is basically the dream of cooking dinner without doing the dishes. Trust me if I had the time I’d garden all day but other obligations get in the way. ?
I love this design and mad respect man, honestlyl. However… plants mostly need watering once planted and situated and that a drip irrigation, some micro controller and some solenoids can easily perform. It is a bit like when you have a hammer everything is a nail… if you are a mechanical engineer you design farmbot… for everyone else there is drip irrigation and some soil moisture sensors. Still it is amazing and I guess in a larger industrial setting this can be turned into a ploughing machine that would help one reset the plant bed between seasons and maybe help planting but really… planting is no big deal once the soil is ready. I a software engineer and I am currently automating my drip irrigation system with home assistant and it is a lot of fun. Looking forward for the bug laser though 😀
Add a laser to burn the weeds
Bill Gates buying up all the farmland is shitting his pants.
what is the purpose of this thing? if you are too lazy and don't like gardening, why bother doing it
Local automated small scale effective home farming tool for the 21st Century.
$3000 is too high a price for this.
Farminator 1.0
when your father was farmer but you majored in robotics
you lost me at the soil sensor.
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Lazy as FCK.
Genius!
I'd like to / we should build an open source flying drone software to give the drone a mapped area where it will harvest all of the fruit of all plants in that area automatically. The drone could track each piece of fruit updating the website with info like how many tomatoes, how many mangos, almonds, onions, chili peppers, etc it expects to harvest the next day so that local residents could request the fruit to be delivered straight from the plant to their doorstep. I will make everything open source and donate the drone (with solar panels to charge it) too so the food will be free for all within its area. The amount of fruit that matures on plants, falls to the ground and is wasted all around us is staggering, plus the same drone could also recognize ideal areas to plant different seeds and plant, care for, track and harvest them too. The drone, or another version of it would also be able to prune and harvest coconut trees as well, landing by grasping onto the upper trunk of the tree, then driving up and down and around for the automated trimming and harvesting. Anyone want to join me in the project to help feed the world for free?
In the future, I plan to add a sub group to C'8 (www.c8coordinate.com) under our search filter Aid Type / Food & Water where an automated donated solar charged food harvesting drone can plant, manage and harvest fruit and vegetables within its mapped urban (for ex) region, updating the C'8 aid offer posts updating the system including predicting maturity quantities and dates with all food delivered direct from the plant to a user's door all for free. People within the region will be able to opt in or partially in selectively allowing the drone to harvest from their property, sharing to the system.
Call me overly positive, but I think we’re leaving the era of ‘greed is good’ and celebrating wealth and entering an #EraOfAltruism and equality. Let’s #AutomateEverything and #SkipToAbundance.
Too loud though.. My neighbors will try to kill me if they have to listen to that the whole day..
Thats nice, a bit of overkill, but really nice.
Nice idea please watch my video also @NwbA
I want to see how the tech has improved in 3 years