I would recommend against the CSS transform the website has on the YouTube videos, that's degrading performance by a margin and is really not worth it.
Also there's no scrollbar at all, that's super silly.
Open Source Farming Robot
91–100 of 236 posts
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#92What about all the illegals? Replacing them with robots? How racist!
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#93The farm is the robot: permaculture.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a slug-hunting robot powered by fermented slugs Isn’t that called a duck?
Ha. But actually, if most people weren't so averse to biological organisms, perhaps we would've had computer controlled ducks, rats, hens and other small animals by now. Why bother reinventing the whole thing when you could just replace (part of) their brains. Experimentation would be pretty gruesome though.
Ducks already eat slugs, no BMI required.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not that true and the robot will hardly help. The reason people don’t do it is that commercial farming is so efficient once you factor in costs growing your own is not cheaper than buying from supermarket.
People don't do it because each hour you spend in your garden is an hour you could have spent doing something else. The problem is not that you have to spend half an hour a day to do it, the problem is that it takes weeks of spending half an hour a day to get anything. And as a beginner, there is a good chance that you're going to screw something up. A lot of people prefer spending half an hour a day learning italian…
It’s not half and hour a day. More like an hour a week. If you don’t enjoy the process of gardening you shouldn’t do it. Over-engineered robotic solutions for small plots are never going to make much sense.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaves probably want some moisture too. If you run pipes straight to the stem you'll have to rearrange them each time you changes here individual plants are which is harder to automate.
Well, my understanding (and common advice) is actually not to water the leaves at all if possible as that has no benefit apart from helping diseases set in.
You can damage the plant if you water leaves in bright sunshine, because water will act as a lens and leaves will get burned. Otherwise I'd follow nature: plants get water when it rains, so leaves should have some water too.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#97The only missing thing to this is a gun. To automatically shoot at random animals interested in your garden.
Yes, planting, watering and weeding are the easy parts. Keeping deer, birds, rabbits and raccoons from eating everything is a much bigger issue, in my experience.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#98I had a friend reach out to me, because his dad is a farmer and needed a programmer to work on his tractors, or something like that. I gave him some suggestions such as posting upwork, and fverr. I would hate to be in his position. I don't see anyone with the required electrical engineering background, willing to work on a one off project for a farmer. As far as I know, he did not find anyone.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#99That's interesting, it's a large CNC machine and not a mobile robot. That makes sense.
Does it? The current construction severely limits the scale at which it could operate, so it will run out of work to do pretty quickly. That means it'll be idle most of the time. If you have a similar complexity robot but mobile, it could be trucking around a much larger field.
I don't think it's a problem to make this robot wider and longer if there will be demand
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a for small hipster raised bed farming in back yard. Maybe it doesn't have to scale to a size of a commercial farm
As a fellow backyard raised bed hipster, part of the point for me is going out and tending it. I struggle to see the value in this unless it’s about scaling.
For me, playing with tech is part of the reason I have a backyard farm. So far I've just played with very basic things like sunken hose irrigation with timers hooked up to a rain gauge so it only waters when there's no rain, but I'd love to have the time to look more into the robotics side of things.
For those of us who sling CRUD sites all day long, the opportunity to dig into more machine/computer interaction is just fun.