Designing Sequences for Farmbot Express

Software Sequences
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Now that we have our bot running, relatively, smoothly I am beginning to tinker with designing sequences. Most of the documentation on the Farmbot website though provides sequence editing advice/tips and tricks for the Genesis models. Is anyone else building out sequences for a Farmbot Express?

One particular thing I am struggling to understand is how to plant or water using externally defined location variables. For example, if I want to set up a sequence that will plant a group of carrots. I have established my 40ish carrots on the farm designer and grouped them together. Now I want to turn the Farmbot loose to work on planting all those carrots but I am struggling with how to sequence it. Any advice from experienced folks?

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Hi @Jjarrell,

That’s a great question. It’s a three step process:

  • Create a group
  • Create a sequence with “externally defined locations”
  • Pass the group to the sequence inside of a “Farm Event” (repeating schedule).

Put Carrots in a Group

First, you will want to create a group of points. You will hear FarmBot users call these “point groups” or just “groups”. In your case, you will want to create a group that contains all of your carrots. The Farm Bot documentation in the previous link will explain this in detail.

Make a Generic Watering Sequence

After that, you will need to create a sequence that moves to a carrot and waters it, but instead of directly moving to a single specific carrot, you will instead want to move to an “externally defined location” using the MOVE TO block. You can think of this location similarly to a variable in a math equation. Later on, we will instruct FarmBot to replace the “externally defined location” with the value of a real carrot in the garden.

The “externally defined location” feature is what makes it possible to water 40 carrots without creating 40 sequences.

Execute the Sequence on a Schedule

Now we have:

  • A group of carrots. (I will call this the “Carrots Group”).
  • A sequence that can water any garden location we pass to it. (I will call it “Sequence A”).

To actually water the carrots on a daily basis, create a Farm Event that calls "Sequence A" and moves to the "Carrots Group" every day. FarmBot OS will infer that you want to run the sequence once against all members of the group, giving us the desired effect of watering each carrot individually on a regular schedule.

I hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any other questions.

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Thanks @RickCarlino
I was attempting to set-up my watering sequence via a regimen and was really struggling with how to make it work. These directions though make a lot more sense.

As our Farmbot is parked at our school, and since our school is currently under quarantine, I was attempting this all from home. However, it was really awesome to watch the bot move into position (via the animation on the Farm designer) for each step of the sequence. I am hoping we can get back to school soon but in the meantime this definitely gives me something to keep me busy.

Thanks again!

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