Make sure to check out Telegarden by Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, from 1995-2004: https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/
Open Source Farming Robot
81–90 of 369 posts
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#82[deleted]
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#83I can't help but feel like this is a satirical send up of "tech bros solve farming," except it's not satire. I am a software engineer, I also runs a small family farm. I have 3d printers and laser cutters and lots of aluminum extrusion and raspberry pis... but I keep those things indoors, away from the dirt, sun, and rain. I can't imagine a real farmer using a contraption like this. Tools have to be reliable to last.…
Whats your point, that its not durable enough? Based on what? It doesn’t have a shovel attachment either as far as i can tell
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#84This worries me from a positioning standpoint. I imagine a large amount of people with a garden bed, even a large one, garden because they like it, this would get in the way of that. The device doesn’t appear like it would scale well to anything large enough, and even then it would compete with much more sophisticated solutions that do this.
I feel like it’s actual market may end up being pretty narrow, not that it isn’t it a cool idea, it is, but it just gave me that gut reaction that it falls squarely in the uncanny valley between industrial users and hobbyists.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#85This worries me from a positioning standpoint. I imagine a large amount of people with a garden bed, even a large one, garden because they like it, this would get in the way of that. The device doesn’t appear like it would scale well to anything large enough, and even then it would compete with much more sophisticated solutions that do this. I feel like it’s actual market may end up being pretty narrow, not that it i…
It makes more sense targeted towards "people that like robots" rather than "people that want to grow their own food".
I'm in a rural area and my first thought seeing this was "Good kit to play with for a growing teenager interested in agricultural automation" rather than "Serious industrial end use tooling".
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Water on the leaves isn’t bad if you’re watering in the morning where it’ll soon evaporate in the sunlight.
I was told that water beads on leaf surfaces act as lenses, creating burnt spots on the leaves. So water at night.
This is 99% urban legend. You can just barely create it in a lab with just the right plant (with thick hydrophobic trichromes) under just the right light with no wind... but that's not what happens in nature.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#87It 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.
Probably?
But spraying water on leaves is not only the way water naturally gets to plants, it's often the only practical way to water crops at scale. Center-pivot irrigation has dramatically increased the amount of and reliability of arable cropland, while being dramatically less sensitive to topography and preparation than flood irrigation.
The advice to "water the soil, not the leaves" is founded in manual watering regimes in very small-scale gardening, often with crops bred to optimize for unnaturally prolific growth at the cost of susceptibility to fungal diseases, but which are still immature, exposing the soil. Or with transplanted bushes and trees where you have full access to the entire mulch bed. And it's absolutely a superior method, in those instances... but it's not like it's a hard-and-fast rule.
We can extend the technique out to mid-size market gardens with modern drip-lines, at the cost of adding to the horrific amounts of plastic being constantly UV-weathered that we see in mid-size market gardens.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#88For some values of "open source": the datasets used for information about the plants and such are unavailable as of the last time I checked.
Not unavailable so much as unmaintained.
Various APIs still exist and are callable. https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593...
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#89It 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.
Probably? But spraying water on leaves is not only the way water naturally gets to plants, it's often the only practical way to water crops at scale. Center-pivot irrigation has dramatically increased the amount of and reliability of arable cropland, while being dramatically less sensitive to topography and preparation than flood irrigation. The advice to "water the soil, not the leaves" is founded in manual watering…
Drip irrigation is kind of a thing out here in the desert...
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#90It 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.
Water on the leaves isn’t bad if you’re watering in the morning where it’ll soon evaporate in the sunlight.
The evaporation is the thing you want to avoid.