In the front yard of Rory Aronson’s San Luis Obispo home (that he shares with 9 roommates), a robot is tending his garden- seeding, watering, weeding, and testing the soil- while he controls it from his phone. FarmBot is what he calls “humanity’s open-source automated precision farming machine”. https://farmbot.io/
As a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo he was inspired by a guest lecture in his organic agriculture class, “when a traditional farmer came in talking about some of the tractor technology he’s using on his farm and I looked at that and said, ‘Wait a minute, I can do that better’, explains Aronson. “The first thing that I thought of when I thought of the idea was, ‘Oh this probably exists let me go look it up’ and I scoured the Internet. I was amazed actually, that there was not a CNC-type farming equipment already existing so I said, well, I guess it’s up to me.”
During the summer after graduation, Aronson wrote a white paper to outline his ideas and within days he had the attention of “software developers, open-source enthusiasts, ag specialists, mechanical engineers, and more”. After several years of iterations and a crowdfunding campaign that has raised over a million dollars, the FarmBot team (Rory and programmers based worldwide) will release the FarmBot Genesis in early 2017.
Using an Arduino and Raspberry Pi, FarmBots are “giant 3D printers, but instead of extruding plastic, its tools are seed injectors, watering nozzles, sensors, and more.” If you want to print your own, the specs are all free and open-source, but if you’d rather buy an all-inclusive kit, it will cost you $2900, a number Aronson says will come down with time. He sees it as a long-term investment. “Because it’s so based in software, all of the functions, it will get better over time so even if you bought a kit today the hardware won’t change, but the software will allow it to do more and more things over time”.
“My long-term vision for FarmBot is that it’s a home appliance,” explains Aronson. “Just like everyone has a refrigerator and a washing machine and a drier maybe you have a Farmbot too and in the backyard doing its thing and it’s like a utility that you use. You turn on the water on your faucet and water comes out, you go out into your backyard and there’s food that’s been grown for you.”
Original story: https://faircompanies.com/videos/open-source-bot-plants-maintains-your-garden-when-you-cant/
40 Comments
Nice idea please watch my video also @NwbA
Thats nice, a bit of overkill, but really nice.
Too loud though.. My neighbors will try to kill me if they have to listen to that the whole day..
I'd like to / we should build an open source flying drone software to give the drone a mapped area where it will harvest all of the fruit of all plants in that area automatically. The drone could track each piece of fruit updating the website with info like how many tomatoes, how many mangos, almonds, onions, chili peppers, etc it expects to harvest the next day so that local residents could request the fruit to be delivered straight from the plant to their doorstep. I will make everything open source and donate the drone (with solar panels to charge it) too so the food will be free for all within its area. The amount of fruit that matures on plants, falls to the ground and is wasted all around us is staggering, plus the same drone could also recognize ideal areas to plant different seeds and plant, care for, track and harvest them too. The drone, or another version of it would also be able to prune and harvest coconut trees as well, landing by grasping onto the upper trunk of the tree, then driving up and down and around for the automated trimming and harvesting. Anyone want to join me in the project to help feed the world for free?
In the future, I plan to add a sub group to C'8 (www.c8coordinate.com) under our search filter Aid Type / Food & Water where an automated donated solar charged food harvesting drone can plant, manage and harvest fruit and vegetables within its mapped urban (for ex) region, updating the C'8 aid offer posts updating the system including predicting maturity quantities and dates with all food delivered direct from the plant to a user's door all for free. People within the region will be able to opt in or partially in selectively allowing the drone to harvest from their property, sharing to the system.
Call me overly positive, but I think we’re leaving the era of ‘greed is good’ and celebrating wealth and entering an #EraOfAltruism and equality. Let’s #AutomateEverything and #SkipToAbundance.
Genius!
Lazy as FCK.
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you lost me at the soil sensor.
when your father was farmer but you majored in robotics
Farminator 1.0
$3000 is too high a price for this.
Local automated small scale effective home farming tool for the 21st Century.
what is the purpose of this thing? if you are too lazy and don't like gardening, why bother doing it
Bill Gates buying up all the farmland is shitting his pants.
Add a laser to burn the weeds
I love this design and mad respect man, honestlyl. However… plants mostly need watering once planted and situated and that a drip irrigation, some micro controller and some solenoids can easily perform. It is a bit like when you have a hammer everything is a nail… if you are a mechanical engineer you design farmbot… for everyone else there is drip irrigation and some soil moisture sensors. Still it is amazing and I guess in a larger industrial setting this can be turned into a ploughing machine that would help one reset the plant bed between seasons and maybe help planting but really… planting is no big deal once the soil is ready. I a software engineer and I am currently automating my drip irrigation system with home assistant and it is a lot of fun. Looking forward for the bug laser though 😀
This is basically the dream of cooking dinner without doing the dishes. Trust me if I had the time I’d garden all day but other obligations get in the way. 😩
Some Weeds will blocked from view of the Robot, by the leaves of the plants.
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I'm speechless. Very elegant design. I'm an EE.
how do you protect your investment from theft, weather, environment and from plant pests?
Did I just hear open source
Wow that is amazing
This is pathetic
Reminds me of the CNC Machine
9:40 Yeah, cool. But you need to have a 3D printer to get theses on the cheap.
FarmBot cost between 1500$-8000$
And it is far from being plug n play.
You should see this as a robot learning experience, not a ROI for low labor vege growing.
But, if you wanna learned about robot, you better buy a DIY 3D printer kit for about 200$ instead.
FUN FACT: All the FarmBot video have their comment section "closed". That's interesting for an open source company isn't?
Having built 3D movement platforms myself the reviews of this are pretty much what I expected. The tracks/stepper motors platform doesn't scale very well and a dirty environment is just begging for trouble.
Silent stepper drivers…
For a while, I've felt discouraged by the lack of adaptive equipment or methods in sustainability circles for people with disabilities. This could put home growing food within reach for a lot of people with mobility issues or unpredictable medical conditions.
Yeah, but follow up. Look at him now. You can buy a Farm bot now. I knew It seemed familiar and yep I saw this years ago. THis is the video I saw. 🙂
Setup in a greenhouse this seems perfect but outside Northern Europe this system will whiter doubt be toast due to the climate
Any reviews from people who bought this product?
nothing like thousands of dollar to grow a couple hundred of produce
how many potatoes does the robot yield xd
Its is chill.
Can be added in vertical farming with tight spaces and high height [semi-automatic farm] with horizontal and vertical movement on ceiling, with simple rotation of action head to access the space of cabinet of plants. 1st uses sensor ,2nd for watering and 3rd for special nutrients supplement.
Imagine private solo / low-crew spaceship able to farming and surviving in space!!
Простите что по русски, я не знаю вашего языка. Капельный полив менее энергозатратный. Ваша идея очень интересная, но я бы сделал посадку семян не так. Делаем линейку с фильерой, из бункера насыпаем семена и они падают с нужным шагом. Это проще. Я бы с удовольствием поучаствовал в вашем проекте. Я инженер систем автоматизации производства.
I am studying to become a gardener. This is so cool!! THE sounds would be a problem for me and it does not look portable enough. If I hade it in My rotation I would probably want to is e it to take Care of seedlings THE first week and then switch over to normal sunpowed watering.
Looks super over-engineered but I love it 😍! I would probably be careful with the humidity sensors as the two prongs one tend to have a short lifespan (fairly easy to fix though).
Also watering tends to be better from the bottom instead of top if you can, to encourage growth root. Probably not useful for small roots crops though.
Also resin printing for food I wonder if its’s safe.
This would be great for people with disabilities also. Great Video.
1.69M Subs. Oh Yeah, Youtube is not fake.
there are already 1000s automatic watering systems, like underground moisture hoses or hydroponic systems.
I don't really see an improvement in the bot watering from above.
planting seeds is nice and all but all in all, while the project is cool from an engineering perspective, it does not really imrprove anything.
moisture sensors don't really need to be moved around, and a mere YL moisture sensor does not give any information about nutritions (and moisturising on soil can be done passive with analogue installments btw)
If you wanna improve the system, then why not use hydroponics? have sensors measure the NPK values and inject small doses until water is optimised. Collect rain water in a tank, as in combining a greenhouse with a solar panel on top, and a water tank at the floor. rotate the whole system 90 ° and make it fit on a wall. Add an led growing panel for rainy dark days.
It is just not really practical to have a big soil compartment standing around, since most people don't even have a garden. But all people have walls, where the tubes for the hydroponic systems can be mounted. Vertical gardening baby