Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Source Farming Robot

farm.bot

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 369 posts

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#91

Post by rmason »

getpost wrote: post #30

It 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.

The best way to water a garden is drip irrigation. You do have to manually lay the tubing and then in the fall roll it up. But there are farmers doing it in large fields so a small garden should be possible. Once everything is hooked up it can be pretty well automated. Home Depot now in some stores has drip irrigation supplies.

https://www.dripworks.com/drip-irrigation

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#92

Post by ein0p »

getpost wrote: post #30

It 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.

I had the same thoughts when watching this. Cucumbers either require twine, in which case they grow quite tall), or each plant will take up half that raised bed. Tomatoes are not planted directly from a seed, you first need to grow seedlings, a very laborious process that’s hard to automate. Tomatoes can also get quite tall, with some plants exceeding 5 feet. You don’t need such elaborate setups for irrigation either - this is trivially solved with drip irrigation stuff available at any Home Depot. And so on and so forth. I grew up on a farm and will probably retire on a farm. The most labor intensive part was weeding and pest control. If you want to do something real, automate that, without making any unwarranted assumptions on how the various crops are planted.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#93

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

rurban wrote: post #32
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #4

It's written in Elixir. Maybe it's just a grass-is-greener thing but the more Kubernetes I have to stomach, the more interested I become in BEAM languages like Elixir. Not like they're alternatives exactly, but I get the feeling that the BEAM way is to solve the ops problems in a way resembles how you solved your dev problems. More holistic, less ad hoc.

See here: https://github.com/FarmBot

And here: https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves (used by FarmBot)

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#94

Post by rvense »

tuatoru wrote: post #69
semicolon_storm wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

I was told to water at night because it doesn't make much sense to pour water on the ground only for it to evaporate before it goes where it's needed.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#95

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #50

The idea of introducing robotics to farming is very attractive. It doesn't seem like this is a scalable solution for farming, but a sufficient one for gardening. They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.

Gantries can go places that tractors can't, like up and down the side of a building.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#96

Post by maxglute »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #50

The idea of introducing robotics to farming is very attractive. It doesn't seem like this is a scalable solution for farming, but a sufficient one for gardening. They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.

>robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time.

Yeah I remember seeing this years ago, and feeling like it was the future. Now it barely feels like a robot.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#97

Post by TheDong »

efilife wrote: post #73
jahewson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s the difference in frequency. There’s likely other factors too, I’d suppose rain purges mold spores from the air for example, as it does with particulate pollution.

May I ask why you used there's instead of there are? There is likely sounds wrong and is wrong and I see it very often

"other factors" can be treated as a singular group noun if you want, so I think both are correct.

By example:

"There are likely to be cows over that hill" - correct, many cows

"There is likely to be a herd of cows over that hill" - correct, one herd

"There are likely to be other factors" - correct, many factors

"There is likely to be a number of other factors" - correct, one collection of many factors

"There are likely to be a number of other factors" - correct, emphasizes the factors over the collection

"There are likely to be other factors" - correct if you want to treat 'other factors' as a singular group. Up for debate.

Also, "there're" is very hard to say, so using "there's" as a contraction for "there are" is, in my book, okay, even if it's not technically correct.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#99

Post by ragebol »

I've always wondered why this robot uses a gantry system.

Would be less intrusive and thus easier to work alongside a human if it was a polar system, with a single pole in the middle/corner, like a tower crane.

Simpler mechanically as well I suppose

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#100

Post by thatcat »

getpost wrote: post #30

It 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.

There's a thing called foliar spraying, where you do spray water and nutrients on the leaves. You don't do it in the sunshine though because the water droplets will magnify the light and burn the leaves.
Post reply on HN