Dear Friends at Farmbot,
(please NB lots of links and pics had to be removed from this post because I’m new)
I hope this finds you all well and safe in these challenging times? I am writing to see if there is anyone there who might be interested to work with me and our company Green Campus Limited on developing a manually demountable FDM pellet extruder tool for the Genesis XL, so that we (and others) can turn one end of their farmbot into a Large Scale Additive Manufacturing (LSAM) 3D printer. Then they can 3D print the bio-composite panels of our opensource Green Camp System structures as pictured below.
(please NB the materials are about €4 per kg and for a “polytunnel” structure like this (Z6L) it costs about €900 for a 10m tunnel including bolts washers, ground pegs, ventilation fittings etc and about €100 for every extra 2m in length one wishes to add to the structure (c. 7kg a panel).
In the above concept design, a pellet extruder in red ( Pulsar Pellet extruder, just one of a few options) and it’s pellet supply & power system in green (a simple vacuum hover that is triggered when more pellets are needed) are mounted onto the extrusion behind the UTM.
Do you think that the gantry could manage this weight?
The pellet feeder feeds the extruder with our 100% non-toxic biomaterials (or any materials the user decides on). Our totally nontoxic materials have been developed by our “CTO” who used to be at Siemens developing the materials for their wind turbines (see a video about Martin and his materials on our www.create.green/team page if you like). The feeder tube could be held out the way by a spring loaded spool that holds the slack.
The “spaceplates” for The Green Camp System need very little in the z dimension (c. 100mm is fine - max 500mm) but they do need a large surface area which makes the Farmbot setup ideal.
This functional means that Farmbot owners can start to produce their own “green-houses” so that the Farmbots can operate in a broader range of climates.
This functional would also allow Farmbot users to be able to print any of the other Green Camp System structures that seek to provide all of the basics life support infrastructure in a regenerative way, and all from these lighter and stronger than steel bio-materials, or any old bottles they can crunch up and feed into the pellet extruder feeder.
With this tool + software addon, Farmbot users could then design other modular farming subassemblies.
We are presently working with the 3D printing Robots developed by [link not allowed] but these robots are expensive to rent. I am currently working with local boat builders (who will use the AI-Build Robots for 3D printing moulds for their boats) to rent one of these machines to cover the rental cost. But it would be great if you could influence the use of these robots too!
Daghan, the inventor and CEO and his team, have developed their own software, controller hardware, firmware and hotends in a learning system that is all proprietary but maybe they could be hired to help developing the software side of this.
I am very keen to opensource all of The Green Camp System and the manufacturing for it and therefore would very much like to try and align with what you are doing.
I do however need help as I couldn’t develop a G-code environment for the Farmbot software and am very limited in my hardware development knowledge. Do you think there is anyone there that would like to team up with me to develop this tooling and software addon so farmbot users can start printing their own structures and joining in the development of The Green Camp System and it’s modular life support sub assemblies (3D printed compost bins, compost loos, modular vertical farming systems etc)?
We were just about to “soft-launch” our Green Campus Ltd. crowdfunding campaign on the 18th of April with the help of
who have over 15m vegan friendly subscribers in the UK.
Our campaign video explains that we need about £30k to rent the AI-Build robots and buy enough materials to 3D print our first Green Campus . We are pre-selling stays at the Campus and pre-booking spaces on our regenerative programs including: Vegan Permaculture Design Certificate, Ecovillage Design Curriculum, Vegan Fitness, Yoga Teacher Training, and others.
I would like to discuss with you including a budget for the development of this " Farmbot 3D printer" addon solution if you think that it would be possible to do this with a Farmbot developer please? This would involved us ordering a Farmbot Genesis XL and including any costs in our development budget.
If there is any interest to discuss this further perhaps we could get on a call over the next week or two? Please do let me know either way.
Please NB we are optimizing our materials for 3D printing with the world’s largest paper company, UPM , who have brought out a 99% non-toxic 3D printing io-composite (UPM Formi), blending their materials with our much stronger (lighter and stronger than steel) materials. Also please NB we have a Tg of c. 130C which is very useful!
I have a little background in developing automated agricultural tech as described in the attached white paper I put together for The WFO with Microsoft Farmbeats project and the head of catering for Microsoft (please see attached [link not allowed]). More info on Green Campus and our business model can be found on the [link not allowed] page and around the website (presently under construction).
I hope to hear back from you soon, I thank you all for your important work and I hope you are all staying safe.
Yours sincerely,
Charles
Founder and General Secretary
Green Campus Ltd.
www.create.green
+447801073913