How big can i go?

[talotz]

I’m looking to move to a massive scale, i’m looking to end up with two farmbots
I’m hoping to have a standard kit and then a second to cover a extra large growing area measuring 40ft X 30ft or 12m X 9m I would like to know if this is possible and if so what extra hardware/cost id be looking at to make this possible. also have some great ideas for new tools, i’m hoping to get started sometime soon with this

[bagginsdada]

@roryaronson

I don’t think it makes technical sense to have one FarmBot move from one bed to another. It makes much more sense to just extend the track and keep the device attached to that one set. As Laird mentioned, the main limiting factor is the number of hours in a day (assuming you solve any hardware difficulties). My FarmBot currently only operates for about 30-60 minutes a day to do watering in the morning and evening, and sometimes mid-day if its really hot out.

But, if you had your FarmBot monitoring the soil often, or detecting and removing weeds, or taking photos, or whatever else, then you could probably have it be doing stuff for 2 hours a day. In which case you should be able to scale up to 12x the size without an issue if you want to fully use the 24 hours available in a day.

But is that really the best? What if its most optimal to water within a certain time period, and then to measure soil moisture within an hour? Then you have to make sure FarmBot can tend to all the plants within a 2 or 3 hour period maybe. And then its idle the rest of the day. It all depends on what you want to do with it.

I read this from another section I think your size will not be an issue its about the amount of time it takes. Hardware wise I think it would only be what you would expect, more cable and hose length, more railing, more cable track.

Their could be voltage drop issues with more length but I think they would have already considered that when they put out the maximum size possible which I think is 50m2(squared) for the base one and double that with modifications.

[bagginsdada]

Another thing I just read was about the weight of the cabling.

Besides just adding more powerful motors;

The two thought I have is to either build a second gantry that has a dummy set of wheels and motor that can be actuated by the main gantry providing it a tug boat hp boost, it could also be a housing unit for storage of bins, extra liquid tanks, or cold weather storage for the main gantry.
The other idea is if you had a above railing based system you could support you cables via a steel cable and zip line trolley system.

[bagginsdada]

Some great new ideas on this in the newbie guide. This is a section. "I also would like to say if someone was to make a ceiling railed powered system with wireless data, water and fertilizer troughs, I would then think it would be a great idea to have multiple upper mounted rails set close enough that they both would be able to reach the whole bed.

Then instead of worry about how many passes with a tool you can have in a 24hr period, you would just need to decide how many rails you wanted to run. This would allow for the manual version of the weed killer which would have plenty of time to beat the weeds into submission.

Any additional cost from adding the above mounted railing and extra arms would be offset from not having to have the ground mounted rails.

It would also provide a place to add shades or reflectors to help the people with too little or too much sun.

You could have the rails in smaller sections with multiple arms as well if that suited the situation better. "

[m0rtal]

What are actual dimensions limitation? I want to go 0,9m x 6m, is it possible?

[roryaronson]

That is probably a feasible size, though as far as I know, nobody has actually implemented a larger FarmBot than 1.5m x 3m and shared the results.

[m0rtal]

Thanks!
What are the main considerations going large scale?

[roryaronson]

Search the forum for “scale” and you will find many discussions about the considerations and potential designs