from Hacker News

FarmBot – Open-Source CNC Farming [video]

by ctingom on 6/7/16, 7:07 PM with 127 comments

• by nostromo on 6/7/16, 8:42 PM

  This is cool but seems a tad over engineered.

  I have a garden. It uses a drip line that's buried in the ground. It's $10 worth of tubing from Lowes with a few holes where plants go. It's on a $15 timer that waters automatically once a day. I do, however, have to take a few minutes to put seeds in the ground.

  That said, I would be throwing money at the monitor right now if this thing was smart enough to identify weeds and remove them. (Maybe that's in the plans? They have a part for weeding shown.)

  But I love all these new ideas around farming. The most interesting is hydroponics considering how much more resourceful it is with water (sometimes using 90% less water per equal amount of harvest).

  Edit: for those asking, all I used was half inch black tubing (the kind they use for automated sprinkler systems), drilled small holes every 12 inches, buried it, hooked it up to a spigot with a timer, and that's it.

• by justsaysmthng on 6/7/16, 9:57 PM

  This is pretty much how I see the future of agriculture. Give the FarmBot a bunch of wheels / robotic feet to move around and it could theoretically handle huge fields.

  The key thing here is the possibility to monitor each individual plant and react to changes in its development or environment (in contrast to modern industrial agriculture, were things are done with huge monster tractors).

  I'm sure it can/will be improved to serve more functions - like removing weeds and collecting pests without the need for herbicides or pesticides and so on.

  Eventually, these will all become software problems which the global programmer community will be more than glad to tackle.

  The most important thing about FarmBot and similar tech, though, is the potential to de-centralize agriculture again and make small-scale, local agriculture possible, without needing to employ human labor. Not only would this create a new market for high-tech agricultural tools and software and make growing your own food easy (even in the city !), it is a very welcome solution to the many environmental problems that large-scale industrial agriculture generates today.

  So I'm very optimistic and happy about this tech and I wish you guys all the luck.

• by gtvwill on 6/7/16, 11:49 PM

  Holy crap is this thing for real? Sorry but this is straight up inefficiency in its finest. Honestly the amount material to produce one farm bot far out weighs the amount of produce in can produce. Like I hate monoculture farming but a 20 Ton tractor can service like 10 Thousand acres of dry area/irrigated cropping country a piece of piss, do it automated and by GPS and return Hundreds of Tons of produce.

  TBH if someone would just build me a robot that has 20 km range, can deal with crawling up hills and can identify coloured shapes and "pick" them (pneumatic suction would probably do it), We could put a few tens of thousand blueberry/coffee pickers out of business.

  FarmBot will not put anyone out of business. The Japanese Aeroponic farms have a better chance of being the future of production.

• by Loughla on 6/7/16, 8:37 PM

  I can't get your site to load, so I checked out the hackaday page.

  Trying not to be overly cynical here, but how is this worth the cost? It appears that it simply plants, waters, and detects/removes weeds. In a 1,250sq.ft. garden, we invest less than 2 hours per week on these tasks.

  How would this be scalable? How do you spell scalable?

  How would this justify its cost?

  How does it withstand being outside all year, year round?

  How does it not just destroy your crops when they grow tall?

  How could this possibly improve on current farming methods (outside of removing chemical weed-killers maybe)?

  I understand it's in its infancy, but I'm genuinely having a hard time with this.

• by dustinmoorenet on 6/7/16, 8:25 PM

  I like that the design is open-source but it is just putting seeds in the ground and watering them. That is not a complex task. I believe this http://openag.media.mit.edu/ is a better system for food growth.

• by cconcepts on 6/7/16, 10:36 PM

  This is clever, and I applaud CNC principles being applied in such a unique way. But once the planting and prep is done (which takes a few hours max for me to do by hand) I now have a several thousand dollar watering can.....

  Make no mistake, this is where agriculture is heading and the people behind this are obviously clever and innovative. I just don't think this is a very compelling product (outside of the "A robot planted my veges" kudos)......yet.

• by Animats on 6/7/16, 11:53 PM

  This thing might be cost-effective if it were scaled up to round farm size. A standard center-pivot irrigator is 400 meters long. An arm that could travel along a track on the irrigator, do precision planting, and look at the plants might be useful. The amount of mechanism would be modest for the area covered.

• by Jack000 on 6/7/16, 8:17 PM

  site seems to be down? I'm guessing it's this project: https://hackaday.io/project/2552-farmbot-open-source-cnc-far...

• by imaginenore on 6/7/16, 9:56 PM

  I bet installing that thing, programming, and feeding it is at least an order of magnitude more time consuming than the actual farming by hand.

• by joshpadnick on 6/7/16, 8:03 PM

  What a cool concept! If any members of FarmBot team are watching this thread, could you comment on why you decided to make everything open source? Clearly, it's an awesome benefit for the community, but how does it also serve FarmBot the company?

  I'm asking b/c I'm curious about business models that build heavily on open source.

• by cellularmitosis on 6/8/16, 1:50 AM

  Using roller-skate wheels and having the gantry ride directly on top of the side-boards of the raised-bed garden would be a great way to reduce parts count here. https://youtu.be/3vgjJikt9B4?t=41s

• by carapace on 6/7/16, 8:17 PM

  I like this but I think a crane rather than track and gantry makes more sense, eh?

• by exar0815 on 6/7/16, 8:17 PM

  Really nice concept. Especially with greenhouses, you can build large systems of it in them.

  But, and don't Vote me down, considering current events, how long until we see a "Weedbot"?

• by ccallebs on 6/7/16, 7:59 PM

  Wow. Just wow.

  I don't know that I've been this excited about a piece of machinery before. This product has the potential to completely change the way we obtain and consume food. I understand it's very niche at the moment. And the price tag will likely be huge for the first run. But this is a great first step and I'll try to pre-order a kit.

• by new_accnt on 6/8/16, 3:05 AM

  Instead of using this cnc-like machine with tracks and stuff like that, wouldn't it be more cheap and simple to use a radial design like many large crop fields already use? It might remove the weed pulling feature in early iterations, but it seems much easier for just watering/nutrition.

• by jannyfer on 6/7/16, 10:56 PM

  Interesting that people have a very different reaction when they see a working video and not just some ideas.

  Last time this was posted on Hacker News three years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6451350

• by IvanK_net on 6/7/16, 9:10 PM

  I think it is the "remake" of a harvester. It is still a machine, that moves above a field on wheels and performs some useful activity on the place where it is located, before moving to the next place.

• by coenhyde on 6/7/16, 8:07 PM

  Awesome! I think i'll build this on my balcony! I've acually been planning something similar in my head for years. But never actually did anything about it.

• by machbio on 6/7/16, 9:38 PM

  Memories of Farmville - this is amazing but it wont work on the large scale, the models seem to slow to in its workflow to care for a larger area.

• by rhgraysonii on 6/7/16, 8:52 PM

  I've interacted with Rick a bit in the past and hes an awesome developer. Really glad to see progress continuing with this.

• by VLM on 6/7/16, 8:05 PM

  In my climate, I get a little extreme fighting the cold. A fairly obvious interchangeable tooling suggestion is some manner of hook or electromagnet or "whatever" to manipulate a cold frame door. Just a helpful suggestion.

• by ElijahLynn on 6/7/16, 9:56 PM

  Holy fucking amazing!