Growing your desired greens is pretty intense work. The preparation of soil seeding planning and constant care must be done to get result. It may seem that there isn’t much to do – just plant a seed and take a look from time to time. But in reality, growing great looking, nutritious plants require constant care that include watering, weeding, fertilizing and timely collecting. If farming isn’t your primary job, then most likely you are going to forget to water or pick weeds. This is why Rory Aronson decided to develop open source farming machine.
Farmbot is a 3 axis CNC platform that can vary in size depending on your soil area. It is capable of taking care of multiple different kinds of crops in same area. Planning and taking care of garden is done via web based interface – its like one of those farming simulators, the only difference is the time you need to wait between some actions and the result is real. Farm bot can work with different tools like seed injectors, watering nozzles, sensors, weeders. All these different actuators work differently, for instance seed injector uses compressed air to pick a seed, for watering there is a solenoid based valve used. Weeder uses spikes to disrupt root system of weeds in early stage. The timing of each actuator is triggered by various events including weather conditions, sensor readings, time schedule and other. The hear of farmbot consist of tow processing units – Raspberry Pi 3 hawing WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity and Arduino Mega2560 with RAMPS 1.4 shield.
Most of the plastic components of farmbot are 3D printable, other components like metal connectors are designed to be easily manufactured with common tools. Despite it’s simplicity, farmbot probably will never payoff. But it guarantees fun gardening and fun great results, because each plant will be cared individually. And why not teach your kids love farming using android app to control the real garden.
