Hello,
I’ve just now started to study farmbot, and i plan on acquiring the materials to start building it as an experiment on our farm. I come from a electronical and robotics engeneering background, but have been working in an agriculture project for the past 6 years.
I would like to share with you an idea on how to possibly overcome size limitations for the vegetable beds, which i think it’s one of the main obstacles for installing a farmbot on a “commercial” vegetable garden.
While the width of 1.5m is more than enough, the length is just too small. So i’ve been reading about how to scale up farmbot, but seems to me it’s just in the beginning.
I think it would be very important to develop a module of “Mapping the productive area” that, when you start for the first time the farmbot, it would scan/sweep all the possible movements it can make in X and Y axis, to understand the dimensions of the bed.
Then a mapping of the vegetable bed would be made based on this scan. So in theory one could build any kind of shape for the bed, as long as it’s compatible with the OpenRail linear rail, and the system would auto-detect the setup of the vegetable bed.
This module would not require any new hardware as it already has the encoders that can translate rotation into linear displacement.
Do you see this as possibility or is there any limitation that i did not consider?
I would be interested in developing such module, once i have a better understanding of the software… but there might be other limitations i’m not aware of…