Seems a bit like Vertical Farming, innovative but way to expensive tech. Anyway good luck!
Open Source Farming Robot
341–350 of 369 posts
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be difficult, but maybe strain your imagination to consider scenarios where people live remotely, off grid, or in areas with unreliable supply chains, or they might even live right next door to be more self-sufficient. Accepting that other people might have different values than you can be challenging, but I have confidence you can do it.
If you live off grid in areas with unreliable supply chains then where do you get spare parts and technical support when the robot breaks?
Farm bot is allegedly open source, so you have access to every part of the design. If you're building some to use off grid, you're a DIYer and are already relying on yourself for many things. You can also stock spare parts when you do the initial build.
The initial build will require shipping parts to a location for pickup, but this is a rare event.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#343Terrible design.
Modular hydroponic pods have always been a better idea and if someone handed me 100 million I'd use it to develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in towns/local communities with minimal water, electricity usage and human intervention.
It's so crazy that we have the tech to do this sort of thing now, but don't. We could do so much if things weren't so profit focussed and the wealthy weren't able to skim most of it off to dump into tax havens.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#344This 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.
But balance that with centralised farms meaning that food needs to be distributed which is currently very bad for the environment. Shipping oranges from Spain is not exactly carbon friendly.
A combination of clean energy transportation/more local growing would help.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#345Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product. Who is the customer? If you like gardening, why would you pay thousands of dollars so that you don't need to do it? If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you. I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spend…
You are wrong. Industrually one can have one of these to work for perhaps 50 beds that go in a conveyor belt or a single large belt conveyor. One would then need only the small version. Hire an accoutant. Research where humans consume unusually lots of fresh produce, ensure it works with one bed for that produce, buy a warehouse (near where most Uber Eats users are), and set up a conveyor belt that will be expanded o…
> buy fake accounts & hire group of third-country freelancers with Good English to do your marketing
I can't really argue with most of the rest, however I can't help but laugh (and cry?) that the hustle obviously has to contain blatantly immoral tactics.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.
But balance that with centralised farms meaning that food needs to be distributed which is currently very bad for the environment. Shipping oranges from Spain is not exactly carbon friendly. A combination of clean energy transportation/more local growing would help.
People generally want a varied diet and lots of stuff only grows in specific places (or only grows well in specific places). So reducing shipping, maybe, but I wouldn't count on it.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
But drip irrigation doesn’t scale because you would need to lay + connect + pressurize + maintain hundreds of miles of hoses. It’s high-CapEx. A “watering robot”, meanwhile, can just do what a human gardener does to water a garden, “at scale.” Picture a carrot harvester-alike machine — something whose main body sits on a dirt track between narrow-packed row-groups, with a gantry over the row-group supported by narrow…
What is the scale you are talking about here? Because at any significant scale the hard part is not where and how you spray the water but how you get the water there. Are you imagining a robot with a tank? How much water can that carry?
For non precision watering, we have existing options.
For other things - There are probably opportunities in adapting the existing center pivot systems with their pivots and tracks and wheels, with heavier truss segments that support robotic actuators up and down the line.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair point, the robot could lower its nozzle to the ground and jet the water there, much like a human would, with probably not a lot of changes required. That does seem like it would be a good optimization.
Isn't it better to mist plants, especially if you can't delay watering due to full sun? IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering. A robot could make and refill clay irrigation Ollas with or without microsprinkler inlets and level sensing with backscatter RF, but do Ollas scale? Why have a moving part there at all? Could just modulate spec valves to high and…
There is a shift underway from ubiquitous tilling to lower and no till options. Tilling solves certain problems in a field - for a while - but causes others, and is relatively expensive. Buried lines do not coexist with tilling.
We are coming to understand a bit more about root biology and the ecosystem of topsoil and it seems like the 20th century approach may have been a highly optimized technique of using a sledgehammer to pound in a screw.
> IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering.
Speaking from experience - they're making it up as their go along. Instructed to water the soil rather than the leaves and a certain number of seconds per diameter of pot, and set loose. The benefit of 'gentle rain' heads (high flow, low velocity, unlike misters) at close range is that they don't blow the heads off the blooming flowers they're selling, which is what happens if you use the heads designed for longer range at close range.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No it isn’t. Yes, it is. > You know what they meant. I have clearly stated what i think they meant. They specifically said "disadvantages compared to us." that heavily implies ( if not outright declares ) an us vs them. It seems you have a different interpretation, I'd be interested to hear what that is if you don't mind ? > you are just one-upping them on a technicality in a way that doesn’t advance the discussion…
> I have clearly stated what i think they meant. Hey and you were wrong. You are pretty bad at understanding what other people are saying. > how what i said was related to the discussion It wasn't related because the other person was correct in that you misunderstood my statement.
> Hey and you were wrong. You are pretty bad at understanding what other people are saying.
Or you are bad at conveying an explicit meaning.
> It wasn't related because the other person was correct in that you misunderstood my statement.
I've outlined why i thought what i did, if that was a misunderstanding of your intention I'm willing to accept that, doesn't mean what you said was clear.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are wrong. Industrually one can have one of these to work for perhaps 50 beds that go in a conveyor belt or a single large belt conveyor. One would then need only the small version. Hire an accoutant. Research where humans consume unusually lots of fresh produce, ensure it works with one bed for that produce, buy a warehouse (near where most Uber Eats users are), and set up a conveyor belt that will be expanded o…
> buy fake accounts & hire group of third-country freelancers with Good English to do your marketing I can't really argue with most of the rest, however I can't help but laugh (and cry?) that the hustle obviously has to contain blatantly immoral tactics.
Money trees obey the jungle rules.
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I realized today that "hustling" is actually very irrational for normal person not only due to prospect theory but ALSO due to the fact that you are not investing in a business with known revenue. For example, having proven that the belt system can work, a VC can probably guess whether this would bring in money. On other hand normal humans "hustle" based on illusion that A brings money because it has "successful" history IN OTHERS' BUSINESSES (probably still high failure rate of course, but say they accounted for that), but they actually should hustle only if they know their A has brought money. This has, with the manipulation of humans to make them "hustle", lead to increased consumption of business "investments" EG SEO-tools, designers, and whatnot—side consumption instead of side hustling.