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Open Source Farming Robot

farm.bot

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Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? I’m intrigued.

Not a huge erlang person but I think the idea is that redundancy and robustness is managed by the BEAM process on each host, so that layer is much higher in the stack. Compared with k8s where it’s like okay die if something goes wrong and the container orchestrator makes you a whole new chroot as if you just rebooted.

And multihost is included out of the box, you don't really need to do anything special.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#13

How many Farmbots would I need to feed 2 adults and 2 children year round? What challenges might I run into? Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters

so 31 farmbots at 3m x 6m?

a bit steep still, plus the maintenance nightmare of keeping 31 machines working..

it's a fun farm to envisage though.

p.s. I don't think that this gantry has very harsh stiffness requirements; I guess one could scale the thing to a larger size reasonably easy -- akin to a configurable MPCNC machine.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#18

How many Farmbots would I need to feed 2 adults and 2 children year round? What challenges might I run into? Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters

You'd be better off doing the farming the old fashioned way if the goal is to feed a family. Farming is a terrible business to be in today, but that's mainly due to the abysmal profit margins. When your goal is to feed your family rather than turn a profit, that stops mattering.

Most people with any yard or outdoor space could get to the point of growing/raising a large portion of their own food without too much investment or work. A garden doesn't have to be manicured and ready for Instagram, it just needs to produce quality food. Meat and dairy would be the outlier lowering that % if you eat a lot of it, though chickens work well with a modest sized yard and finding a local dairy or farm for meat is still a big improvement on grocery store meat and dairy.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#19

How many Farmbots would I need to feed 2 adults and 2 children year round? What challenges might I run into? Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters

To summarize the analysis: you would need 100-200 square meters of farmbotting to get 2000 daily calories from farmbots alone. If you're just trying to get your daily recommended servings of veggies, you instead target volume of veggies, because that's how the recommendations work, and it's a much smaller quantity. It ends up being 3-7 square meters per person for that.

A small farmbot covers 4.5 m^2 and costs $3,000, an XL covers 18 m^2 and costs $4,500.

I think 3-7 sq m makes sense as a practical range, maybe round up to 10 to have some wiggle room.

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