Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

Well..

I could see a path forward, but it would be quite a bit of CNC like automation. Primarily, I can see a hydroponics setup being used with a Farmbot.io style automation. With this, a bot would zip up and down powered rails, and use Wifi to communicate with the base station. Buckets would be provided for the toolhead to pull plants done growing.

Ideally, this could be used to grow herbs, lettuces, and the like on huge racks. Of course, in the jurisdictions that allow it, could be modified for cannabis as well.

The long and short, is that machine vision can be utilized to determine the fitness of a plant and its finished growing season. Add tilapia to this and you have a near closed-loop biological system. And then you can also sell fresh live tilapia.

To give an example, 25 sq ft of this system provides enough food for a human indefinitely.

This also localizes food production thus strengthening national food security. And this one is what wins a lot of conservative types who want to see a gain rather than "feed the fuzzies" kind of reasoning.

> Of course, in the jurisdictions that allow it, could be modified for cannabis as well.

I suspect this is the actual reasoning and target product.

Unfortunately, you can't get funding for that legally in most jurisdictions.

Well, yeah. Shrooms and Weed are the two I could think of that would easily support hydroponic grow systems. Ideally, I could see them taking off in the Southwest, given intensity of the sun and win power. The only thing that would really cost is water, and that should be closed-loop as much as possible. I'd wonder if some of the new metal-organo-frameworks could efficiently get water from the air as they were reported to do.

But republicans are still moralizing christians that wish to force their ideals upon others. Because if anything's been shown, cannabis is one hell of a tax generator and mucho underutilized commerce. But aside this illegal usage in most jurisdictions, this could suffice growing in bad environments or to people with way too much money to spend.

There could be a different segment; people who want guaranteed food supply. And locally, this could make food safety a guarantee. I could also see this as a non-profit as well, with low income and homeless getting free access.

And locally, this could make food safety a guarantee.

No it doesn't.

If a farm has a bad harvest, there are other farms a store can buy from. If the store has a bad harvest. They're competing with their own customers to buy food from the next store over.

How the hell would you use a hydroponic system to grow any type of mushroom, that makes no sense

Hey I am building something of this nature but a much simplified version. It's www.kokonaut.com

Neat. But a friendly word of warning.

You've got DHT11's pictured in you product photos. Don't use DHT11's for, well, anything.

I deployed ~ 100. After 8 months, only 35 still work. Even when they worked, the data was so variable they were constant trouble. Of the 35 that still work, about half are now giving useless humidity readings.

Caveat emptor and all that yap.

Have you found an alternative that works more consistently?

A little background. I made essentially exactly what he's selling as a garden monitor to place in a few dozen machine cabinets and motor compartments in a newspaper printing plant. Printing presses are hot, wet things and you can predict failure if things get too hot, or too humid.

So bare ESP8266 modules, OSH Park boards, and the sensors. After my DHT's started kicking the bucket two things helped:

1) Switching my software to only power my sensors for the time I needed to take measurements. (Once per 10 minutes). It does take some seconds to stabilize before taking the reading but the sensors spend most of their time off. I had to cut traces and add a little transistor to the boards to make this happen. That sucked.

2)I picked up some SHT71's and was able to bodge them onto the failed boards in place of the dead DHT's. All it took was a firmware update for my ESP8266. This was easy. I have not lost one since. I don't know how much 1) has to do with that.

As an added benefit, I've got my esp's deep sleeping during the off times (had to add one jumper wire to make this work... easy) and can now power them for weeks at a time with a pair of alkaline batteries.

Deep sleep is definitely the way to go :).

For Sensor Comparisons, check out this site. Someone from a previous post on Hackaday turned me to it a few months back. Very comprehensive and is what led me to go with the BME280:

https://www.kandrsmith.org/RJS/Misc/Hygrometers/calib_many.h...

Very true.

Those were the old versions. The new versions are using bme280.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com