Farm Hack:IOWA will focus on on-farm energy for small farms. Out-of-the box farm hacks. Electric tractors, farmer-built machinery, WVO/biodiesel, micro-wind, micro-hydro, and wood gas/producer gas fuels.
Day 1 -Wednesday, JUNE 20
Just thought I'd give you guys a little update on my progress since we're coming up on the field testing the weekend after this! The following discussion may not be of interest to everyone, but for the curious, here it goes (for the hurried, see end of post). Last week I was working on two different Arduino sketches that would be the brain of Fido - one was the loop that would take measurements, log data, and send updates and one was the one that would manage text messages. When they were both working great I merged the two programs only to realize that I was out of program memory!
Most of our FarmHack events have been at engineering schools (mechanical, environmental, etc.). But I see a great opportunity to to team up with architects to develop designs that will benefit young and beginning farmers.
My vegetable farm started out really small and grew quickly over the course of 6 years or so. We were on rented land and challenged with making all of our infrastructure non-permanent.
There's a real need for designs for farm infrastructure that is:
This is really an exciting tool. I am impressed with the work you've done with this.
I figured the picture of the Arduino was not very descriptive of what we're building so took a few images from The Noun Project and whipped together this concept logo. Attached is the source file in GIMP format (open source image editor).
Update 1 It looks like Louis and I agree on this one since we both suggested the same idea at the exact same time :P. We're looking for feedback from other folks now on our proposals for how to interact with Fido via text messages.
I've obviously a little biased but would be remiss not to suggest adding Foodtree to the list of tools for farmers and food business owners; we've got a free web and mobile app for sharing your food with food lovers. It's a simple way to share "where to buy" and "where we source from" information with food consumers directly, on any mobile phone. We also built a free iPhone app specifically for sharing photos of food and tagging those photos with Where Found and Where From information.
Within the tools/apps wiki I think it'd make sense to make sure the group's aware of the Open Food Data movement. It was launched at South by Southwest in a collaboration lead by Foodtree, Food+Tech Connect, CleanPlates, WindowFarms, and the support of many others...it's a collective effort to open source food data standards so that app and tool builders don't have to reinvent the wheel.
One thing I have in mind for increasing the speed of moving the Low-cost mobile hoop house is a version of what used to be called a wagon jack. Basically I believe they were cam levers that would lift and hold the body of a wagon up so a wheel could be removed/repaired. Something along those lines would be ideal as you could operate the jack, attach a wheel assembly, drop the jack so the house is resting on the wheel, and move down the house to the next wheel location, easy peasy.
If a Farmer needs to monitor multiple locations, there are a couple of different ways we could tackle this.