Hi all! I am discussing with the Vestry at my church whether farmbot might be a good way to grow food for my church to provide to the needy in our area. I think it would be a good way to involve the youth of the church and the more technically-skilled in doing something that christianity tells us to do anyway.
My question is this: Has anyone given any thought to ways of making a farmbot less likely to be stolen? I can imagine doing things like building fences and perhaps using hardware with unusual head patterns to minimize its tendency to walk away. Does anyone have other ideas?
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I dont think anything is theft proof but maybe you could make it hard enough not to be worth the effort. Most parts of the farmbot would not resell for two much as individual items and the ones that would sell would be tough to move (I guess).
So I am thinking as long as you can make it a hard to get item that would not sell for much it might be safe. To that end I think maybe you could have the farmbot lock in around the railing so it would be very hard to de-install it and maybe instead of screws put riots in as many places as possible so they would literary have to rear it up to get anything. This would kill their efforts and motivations (as long as they are not just vandals) Other thought would be to put it into a plastic cover green house (or put it on the roof) so no one could scope out the area to well, start a campaign while giving you classes or speeches that down place the cost of the whole thing so that word would not spread that it was work much (drop farmbot off the name so it cant be googled). Make a web cam and spread the word about it under the guise that anyone can look into the garden at any time but drop the hint that everything is captured and kept online.
All in all a farmbot it worth a lot as a total but I dont think anything they could and would target would be worth more then &50.
I would hook up a webcam or two and use the amazing (and free) open source iSpy software for a cheap security camera system.
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Thank you both for your thoughts. Webcams make a lot of sense. @bagginsdada, could you please help me understand what you meant when you said to use Riots? I can find an OS named Riot, but nothing hardware has come to my attention.
The idea of putting this on a roof occurred to me after seeing some work out of University of Montreal that seemed to dovetail nicely with this on TED. My church parish hall has a great flat roof of with about 10x25 feet of open and practically usable space. My concern is how to determine if the roof can safely bear the load I’m wanting to put on it. At 120 lbs per cubic foot, and at one foot deep, I see 30,000 lbs or so. That doesn’t seem rational to expect it to hold that. I wonder is there some other medium that could reasonably be used instead of soil…
It looks like I’ve answered that question for myself. At the end of this article, it says that other growth media can be used that weigh much less than soil. http://www.facilitymanagement.com/articles/green1-0410.html Oddly the author expresses things in square feet rather than cubic feet, and I didn’t see how deep this was assumed to be. He said 12-22 lbs/sq ft was normal, fully saturated.
Hopefully this is of help to someone other than me!
You could try hydroponics to save weight. Its limited with what you can do with it but its an option.
Sorry that was a typo I did not mean riots. I meant rivets.
For roof limits, my guess is an inspector could tell you, and it will probably be part of getting the permits to install it on the roof anyway.
Ah. Rivets. Thank you for the clarification.
You could replace regular fasteners with tamper-proof like these:
www.insight-security.com/security-screws-anti-tamper
It would just make it that much harder…