This project sucks ass - I know some research groups (non-engineering, they were more ag programs) who purchased it from them for a few thousand dollars and pretty much shelved it after a few months - unreliable hardware, buggy software, minimal support - all in all it would probably have been much more easier if we hired a bunch of engineering undergrads to build something like this from scratch.
Open Source Farming Robot
251–260 of 369 posts
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#252I'm surprised no one has mentioned hydroponics. For $2800 you can build a very nice, large, and mostly automated hydroponics setup. It would have higher yields, no weeding, minimal pests if indoors, better nutrient control, a smaller footprint, more reliability, and less complexity.
what are benefits of soil vs hydroponics?
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its written the way it'd be spoken, which seems fine for informal writing
The point is it shouldn't be spoken like this. It's just wrong. I'm wondering whether the person is unaware or is this some slang I don't know about. I've seen a bunch of people speak like this, I'm trying to understand the reason
> It's just wrong.
Language is ultimately descriptive, not prescriptive -- so common patterns are never "just wrong". But as someone who taught English for many years, I'm actually fascinated by what you've noticed. Because as an overeducated native English speaker, I observe that:
- "There's likely other factors" sounds totally fine to me.
- "There is likely other factors" sounds horribly wrong.
- "There's other factors" sounds wrong, but not horribly so.
- "There are likely other factors" sounds fine, but you wouldn't usually say "there are" as two distinct words, you'd say...
- "There're likely other factors" which would sound fine if perfectly enunciated, except the "'re" tends to get swallowed up and it will easily sound like "There likely other factors" to the listener which will sound wrong
So my theory here is that, in order to aural eliminate confusion between "there" and "there're", there's an unwritten rule in spoken English where we substitute "there's" instead when the plural object isn't immediately following, but has an adverb intervening.
I'm not 100% sure this is a full explanation of the phenomenon, but what I can tell you is that criticizing it is useless. It's just how native speakers talk -- it's conventional English (at least in the US). What is interesting is investigating it, though! So thanks for noticing a little quirk of English like that.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't rain fall on the leaves as much as the soil?
Here's a wild thing: at many of the high end vineyards they'll do low-level helicopter flights over the vines every time it rains to blow the water off the leaves and fruit specifically to prevent infection and rot.
I’ve heard of this for frost prevention, but never rain. Do you know of a specific vineyard doing this?
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#255This is a Juicero of farming. The whole setup is easily replaced with a raised garden bed and a drip hose. Hearing about this a few years back, I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.
I agree. What they should have done is make the raised bed thinner and build a wheeled rover for planting. In exchange for having smaller beds, you can now let the rover service dozens of beds. The irrigation system should be integrated directly into the beds and the rover merely tries to check the soil moisture to conserve water and prevent mold.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#256This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
In 20 years most people won’t be able to afford a yard
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#257I'm surprised no one has mentioned hydroponics. For $2800 you can build a very nice, large, and mostly automated hydroponics setup. It would have higher yields, no weeding, minimal pests if indoors, better nutrient control, a smaller footprint, more reliability, and less complexity.
what are benefits of soil vs hydroponics?
Soil farming (think small family farm) in a field has the advantage of being stupidly cheap. Free sun, free water, free nutrients, as long as you're not going for 150% yields like the big mono-farms do. The tradeoff is lack of consistency. It's easy to have a bad season that gives you shit yields. Plus it's a ton of work. There's a reason we've worked so hard to automate so much of that.
Hydro gives you a significant amount of control. Exact amount and wavelength of light, exact timing and amount of nutrients, exact temperature, humidity, co2, wind, etc. All with significantly higher costs. There's a reason that those "hydroponics in a skyscraper" basically grow lettuce, because it's the same growing profile as weed, which is a high profit crop.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are already some good points made about efficiency, but I’ll also add that for an individual sometimes it’s not about efficiency but about survivability in the event of a crisis. As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk, so it’s logical that some would want to mitigate the risk of food production failures.
By the looks of things we did make out of COVID-19 just fine (from a civilization standpoint even if not at the individual level for all individuals) so not sure this supports your point.
“Just fine” is relative I suppose. We were fortunate that COVID-19 was relatively mild compared to what could have happened, but if you recall, there were major supply chain issues and at least in my area there were shortages, outages, and elevated prices on food items. Given what we saw, it seems reasonable to me that some people would want to hedge against something even worse by growing at least some of their food at home.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#259This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.
One large farm needs to optimize for their own needs instead of mine. I want tomatoes that taste good but they barely exist at the store. Large farms want to sell flavourless tomatoes that look nice and last a long time.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#260It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.
A few years ago I saw on a tropical island some open ended poly tunnels growing salads and things that, in my own open air garden, are very heavily predated. They had a simple but very effective solution: they ran misters for a few minutes every hour. This made an environment that the plants thrived and insects left alone. And they lost very little water (on an island where fresh water was conserved generally) even t…
So it’s like a giant 2L bottle on its side with the ends cut off and no label? Was the soil inside fully or was this a covering? Very cool