I saw a picture and video of an older?? seeder design instead ofthe needle type. It was a finger width of plastic that seemed to have a vacuum hole in it.
My issue is that with the needle, the seed often comes off the needle as it is pushed into the soil. I was wondering if this design was more success than the needle design?
Thoughts
That design did have a better ability to push the seed into the soil without it falling off to the side (and onto the top of the soil). Though it was designed as a 3D printed part, not a mass manufactured part, so it never made it to the production kits. It was also somewhat tricky to achieve a good print quality given the very thin walls at the tip. But today’s printers are much better than the ones I was using 8 years ago when that design was first tried.
I have several 3D printers and are willing to print and test if you have an STL file.
I did design my own ‘hole poker’ and printed it. It worked wonderfully to create a nice hole. I was then going to get a seed ‘dropped’ in from the needle then close the hole.
Nice! It looks like the old seeder design is available in Onshape - FarmBot Genesis v1.1 Seeder
Export to STL with the button on the bottom toolbar:
Note that the old design has the “needle” centered in the tool, whereas the production design and your hole poker are centered on the vacuum port. So you’ll need to use a different offset with the v1.1 seeder if printed as-is.
Another option for a hole poker is to attach on a luer lock needle plastic cover to the needle. These have been included with most of our kits, but admittedly not all of them (I can’t remember which production runs didn’t have them).
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