So , Recently I have been interested in Farming. I have made my own food computer…
I recently came to know about this FarmBot… My question is can I build this farmbot on 1 acre of land.
Is it possible to custom make the aluminum tracks and connect each other to cover an area of 1 acre land ?
Regards
Rajhans Kshirsagar
Hello Rajhans,
The answer is likely yes but it’s not so straight forward just yet and there are some development issues that may need to be overcome before they can get to that size.
Currently the Farmbot offers the Farmbot Genesis (5 feet wide and 10 feet long) and the Farmbot Genesis XL (10 feet wide and 20 feet long) models. These systems have been tested and they work well to service these areas. Once you get into serving larger areas the X and Y Farmbot motors become underpowered and potentially unreliable. The water pump would also need to be resized to account for the additional hose resistance. As the service area increases the proportional weight of the support structure, cables and hoses increase also. The stepper motors that the Farmbot team selected are able to work reliably for the weight of the systems they currently offer.
The great thing about the Farmbot device is that all the plans and designs are open source available online. So if you’re resourceful and you have some engineering background or some friends that can help you, there’s nothing stopping you from developing an even larger Farmbot.
I expect that the Development team at Farmbot is working on developing an even larger device for the future. It’s my opinion that the leap from v1.2 to v1.4 XL is quite remarkable and it’s increased the usable area by 4X.
What part of the world do you live in? You may be able to meet up with current Farmbot owners and see for yourself how the Farmbot works.
Marc
You are better off splitting up the job with multiple farm bots
Also, if you expand one direction (either x or y) rather then both, you can have a rover cover 10 by 800 or so with a few small upgrades.
With an acre of land, at that size, it wouldn’t even be about “can it be big enough” but rather “how long will it take?” I can imagine the motors on the thing to farm an entire field like that would be enormous.
Hello Marc,
Thanks for your reply.
A few of us areinterested in this. One approach that’s been discussed is to use long rails, and have the bot calibrate itself regularly using a barcode scanner, with barcodes positioned along the rails at regular intervals