It's a neat idea, but at a small scale the little planting and weeding is really not a big deal to do by hand and scaling this up to greenhouse size would be probably prohibitly expensive for most people.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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There are people who cannot do even that little bit of weeding.
Then in all likelihood they can't maintain such a robot either.
this is sadly one of the big problems with farmbot, keeping the trackways clear in an actual use situation requires as much work as weeding. My hope is that ambulatory platforms (spider robots) which are able to nimbly move through a garden space while carrying the required tool heads will be able to use these methods to work in much larger areas and without so much visually disagreeable infrastructure.
🕷️💚
Do you know if anybody is working on a spider / walking bot?
I was looking at the farmbot and thinking a version with 20" bicycle wheels would be better. Then you could have a long path where it just moves back and forth. And maybe use a robot arm based on rotating arms instead of linear actuators. And then build the whole thing so it fits neatly under a big glass solar panel. Maybe a tool changer so it can pick up a watering can. The mechanical side should be relatively easy to build, the problem still seems to be the AI vision software.
With food prices rising it might be worth it if you can increase the area it can patrol.
Having been around CNCs, robots, and gardens I tend to agree. If you can't handle weeding in a human-sized garden, don't garden. Especially when you mulch and plant a good mix to cover ground and different plant heights there aren't really any weeds to begin with.
I am really interested in small scale farm automation but not 3k interested! Keep meaning to automate irrigation which would save me a lot of time watering but not cost too much. Cnoc farming would be a fun project though
i feel weird about self promoting but I make a project called the Pigrow which is an open source garden automation project designed to be as cheap and flexible as possible by using a raspberry pi and basic components from ebay or wherever. It's got tools to help you monitor and control the grow environment including various watering tools. It's not as polished as farmbot but under constant development and having new features added all the time, if you want to set up a cheap irrigation automation system then it might be a good option and if not then i'd love to hear what features it'd need for you to consider using it so i can try and add them. More info at [email protected]
Looks like an awesome project!
Perfect, I will definitely be trying this. I have been looking for an excuse to buy a raspberry pi!
I had a look at the moisture sensors which was really interesting and the waterproofing of the unit which was an ingenious budget idea. I would probably look to use cheaper/ simpler moisture sensors to start with.
One thing I would be interested in is connecting it to a weather forecast service so it doesn’t irrigate when there is rain forecast.
Thank you so much for developing and sharing this.
I love FarmBot, not really super practical at the moment and wildly expensive but it's been making great progress and is unquestionably heading in a great and very useful direction. I think we're very close to ai controlled robotics being able to replace the clunky CNC system at which point the project will really come into it's own. Really glad they're still working on the automated weeding and stuff, that'll all be so useful when more reliable and easier hardware platforms are available.
I'm all for this!