I going to build my own Farmbot.
But I have no enough space to install soil bed.
Therefore, I want to change soil bad to 1000 X 1500.
I want to know is it possible.
Yes, the current design can scale to that size. It can go even smaller if you need it to, though you may not get a lot of value out of your FarmBot if it is only taking care of a few plants due to the limited space.
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Hi there,
I’m new here and i’m replying to this post because i’m in the same situation.
I live in an apartment and the only space that i have is a flower box in my balcony.
I’ve measured the working area and it’s about 2 meters x 36 centimeters.
Can i install a Farmbot in this small area? there are some hardware and software limits?
Many Thanks
I’m curious about the opposite - what’s the practical limitations of bed extension? (Is 3m x 5m feasible?)
It’s possible but you need to find yourself proper engines to move the farmbot
I assume it’s like my home-brew CNC stuff - bigger beds basically require NEMA-23 motors, 40x40 or 2060 extrusions for stiffness, and some minor tweaks to software/calibration. But it looks like the FarmBot doesn’t need to be quite as heavily built as a machining table.
Would be interesting to see what other people have done - is there a Customer Builds page on the wiki or something? (I didn’t see one.)
Search the forums, there are many topics discussing the dimensions of the bot. The easiest way to increase your bot’s size is to increase the track length (up to 12 meter with current motors).
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I don’t get it, Why would one need bigger motors to go farther? Bigger motors to Carry more weight, Bigger motors to go uphill, but to go farther? why can’t the thing run as much as several hundred feet, or miles with the existing motors? Where is the limitation?
If I were to buy such a cool accessory, I would hope to feed my family and maybe a few neighbors, the apparent bed size is not capable of doing that…
Cables, cable carriers and water in the tubes is not weightless. The further you go, the more weight you need to pull along.
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Is Farmbot looking to create multiple size options (for example, small for apartment living), medium (1.5m x 3.0m). larger (3.0m x 6.0m and large for community growers and/or commercial growers? I am looking for the larger (3x6) size as the current size does not justify the costs in my mind. Thanks for any insight into future plans in advance.
As I am not official FarmBot representative I cannot comment on future plans for FarmBot.
All I know is that in the past FarmBot reps have said (search the forum) that it’s likely the current v1.2 kit can support larger setups. But the size increase is the easiest in the X direction and the hardest in the Z direction.
They have claimed (though not confirmed) that the current motors should be able to support a 1.5 * 12 meter setup (X being the long axis in this case).
Hi ,
How customizable is the software to cater for the different bed sizes.
I’m planning to purchase and use farmbot for a bed 1.2x1.2 m. What will it take to have the software playing nicely with the system
Hey @m.attia
You would need to cut the extrusions to your desired length (1.2m in your case).
Fambot has a function to detect the length of each axis by itself (calibration). In this procedure Farmbot drives every axis to both ends of the track and measures the distance. With this distance your bed size and software endstops are beeing set.
thanks for that that was helpful !
Also I would like to work on adding customised software functionality within farmbot
Can you point me to where I can do deploy third party applications for farmbot ?
Through Google, I found references to something called farmbot-serial. I’m not quite sure how it all works though.
https://software.farmbot.io/v1.0/blog/announcing-the-farmbot-serial-ruby-gem
what I would like to do is develop more applications for farmbot which I
can then deploy onto the hardware
Cheers
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@m.attia This is possible! Unfortunately, farmbot-serial is over 2 years old. We have since replaced it with better solutions.
You have a few options:
- For writing software that resides in Farmbot: You can run a “Farmware”- a plugin that runs on the device. Usually, they are written in Python, but other languages are supported. This is a very new feature so it is worth mentioning that the APIs may change in the future. Please see the Farmware Documentation
- For remote control of a Farmbot: FarmBotJS allows you to control Farmbot from a different computer using Javascript. You can also control Farmbot directly via the MQTT protocol in any programming language you choose. I wrote an example in python to illustrate this.
Hi Rick,
what does that mean? Do you already have in mind to change it? I would like to dig into it, but if you would change the programming language in future and I would need to rewrite the code, that`ll kill my support for the farmware plugin…
We don’t have changes in mind at the moment. When we do need to make changes, they will relate to API calling conventions. If you wish to try out Python Farmware development, you can do so knowing that we will not remove support for the language, but may change the underlying APIs. These changes may warrant updates to a Farmware codebase. For developers that just want to try things out, it should not be a problem. For critical applications, it might be best to wait until the Farmware APIs stabilize. Our intentions with this decision were twofold. It gives developers early access to Farmware features as we write them. Secondly, it means that we can change architectural issues quickly without needing to bear the burden of long term support. Eventually, Farmware will stabilize enough for general public use and we will provide a versioned API with backwards compatibility support. We’re not at that point yet, though.
If there are any other questions relating to Farmware development, I would be happy to answer them in a new discussion thread.