Rotatable UTM thoughts

Feature Requests
1

I am not sure if this has been discussed before (I did some searching but did not find anything, but that just means I may be a bad seeker…)
So…
What if th UTM was able to rotate?
Pros:

  1. Able to direct water at an angle (using modified watering tool)
  2. Able to “grind” weeds into soil

Cons:

  1. A lot of complexity for relatively low roi (I could only think of water & weeding use cases)
  2. Another moving part = added point of failure; added cost

Just thought to toss out the idea, and am interested in the why’s and why nots…

2

So you can avoid to water only big leafes and try to get the water near to the roots? Or what was your intention of moving the water output direction?

I think most soil grounds are really hard and it would take a lot of power to move a tool inside the soil. Also the Z-axis would need to be reworked since it does not withstand such forces.

3

@Ascend

Yes. I had read a topic that was discussing dumping water on mature plants, and this seemed like a solution.

I agree that this would add a stress point that the current tool was not designed for. I had not thought of what forces in that axis would do.

This was just an “I wonder” topic. It kinda looks like a non-starter… ohh well… back to the drawing board…

@Ascend - Thanks for the input!
~Tony

4

Another possible solution to directing water at an angle is to make a modified watering nozzle tool that redirects the stream coming from the UTM to the desired angle. It wouldn’t be adjustable, but perhaps you wouldn’t need it to be.

1 Like
5

I like that idea…
You could have “water left”, “water right” tools

6

Thats indeed a possible solution, but it comes with some additional work. You would need to change the watering position for every plant that needs to be watered like this. The current looping farmwares would need to be updated or you would need to make sequences by hand again. Hardware is easy and cheap to do, but the effort that needs to be put in the software part is much over the the use in my opinion :slight_smile:

7

Maybe use opencv to estimate the angle of watering based on camera feature detection of plant outline (would need more than a circle, use pixel color to better quantize outline?) and the currently loaded static water tool. In short, I think the camera could help!