Farmbot Express XL doesnt seem to be a ready product

Weared out wood on the X axle, not working emergency stop switch, poor wifi signal, stalling motors, parts not fitting during assambly (belt, two pieces of the Y axle where way to tight) and quite a few other flaws of the Farmbot Express XL

Regarding the X axle, the aluminium profiles i have made did help.
Altough i had to make it with 3 mm precision what is quite hard in a garden over the length of the whole track!


Wonder how the XXL (18 meter) could make it over the track without wearing the track straight away and crashing somewhere.

It feels i have bought a product that is not fully developed jet. Too little testing.

Although the service has been really friendly it basically brought me a 2500 euro robot that doesn’t do what it is believing me to do.
Required way too much of my time and i can’t explain anyone how to get the next step working.

I had to return back to the Netherlands leaving the Farmbot Express not working in the garden.
I won’t be able to work on it the next 4 months meaning that during the past two months in France i did not manage to get it working properly.

The idea of using it for a robotics youth training is not going to work out right now and neither in September when i come back to the farm.

@Catfarm Hello, I also purchased a Farmbot Express XL which I am currently installing in Belgium.
I am experiencing similar rail problems and had some questions on your solution

I read that you are currently located in the Netherlands which is not so far from Belgium.
Is it possible to contact you directly and discuss together some of the issues?

1 Like

not working emergency stop switch, poor wifi signal, stalling motors,

Hi catfarm,

  • not working emergency stop switch is connected to a poor wifi signal so you should fix the poor wifi signal at frist
  • stalling motors:
    choose one axis: tight/untight your belts, tight/untight your rolls and get a feeling how your farmbot reacts to your actions. Recommend to start with your Y-Axis because it’s the smallest one.
    calibration runs: a run is successful if you have no e-stops, disable e-stops on movement error (in errorhandling) and play around with the values in encoder section and increase the timeouts. If one run is successful, start several arounds and check the variance in your lenght (shouldn’t be higher than 2mm, 1mm is the best)

I totally agree with you, calibration of the farmbot is a pain in the ass and the farmbot-team could invest more time to improve this steps for the beginners. I spent a whole week to calibrate mine (farmbot 1.4) and it’s only 1x4meters and now the winter is coming :(. But I learnt what i have to do and next year it will be faster.

@fafi maybe add improve getting a Farmbot calibrated with some ideas of what to improve, to feature requests. The team does review and often fix this stuff.

@whitecaps is missed a tool which ran an axis x times, calculates the variance and tell me if the error is small enough to go in ‘production’ with it. But I’m unsure if I’m just pedantic or every farmboter make this manually.

1 Like

Hi Fafi,

thank you for your reply.

Even at the moment when I had the accesspoint right next to the farmbot the E-stop did not work.
This had to do with the software. i bet that in later versions this was solved but that was to late for me since I had already returned the farmbot after over 2 weeks working on it.

Regarding the Raspberypi zero, I think that it would work better if people would get the choose to upgrade it for an additional 30 euro.
The zero has a lot more troubles executing longer sequences and the wifi connection is just absolutely terrible.

The stalling motors on the Y (and Z) axis eventually went alright.
It was indeed some work but I managed there.

But the designers choose to let a Z-axis go over a wooden rail I have jet to understand.
It costsed me over 70 euro extra to buy the aluminium profiles and it still felt like a half solution.

I have just purchased the Microfarm, the XL version. Same costs as the express but with actually an aluminium Z track.
Will make a review for the people interested in more homebrew versions of the Farmbot.