Information

New tool post can be found here: http://www.farmhack.org/tools/prone-position-weederharvester-workstation

new Tool page can be found here: http://www.farmhack.org/tools/garlic-planting-implement

Our group design discussion explored ways to make planting garlic cloves a mechanized process, or at least more ergonomic and/or efficient for the planter. The primary challenge in planting is that the cloves should be planted with the base of the clove downward for optimal yield. The variation in clove size and shape makes this orientation a very challenging issue to address mechanically.

Our group discussed three overall approaches:

The Irrigation Caddy ( http://www.irrigationcaddy.com/index-6.html )may address many of the wants in the project scope as it has a web interface, can handle up to 10 zones and accept one rain gage input. It also works with a smart phone home automation program EZ-VRC (http://www.ezvrc.com/ezvrc/Home.html) which can probably control some of the other sensors we are considering.

Here is a link, which leads to other links of home brew and lower cost commercial irrigation controllers, most are TCP/IP http://forums.makezine.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=2074 .

Ware Brothers had a commercial product for several years which received reasonably good reviews, but the company was acquired and their product is no longer available.

Here is a paper often referenced on pedal power

Hello all,

Hey guys,

I attended the Open-Source Hardware Summit (OSHWS) last week in NYC. It was basically a full day of back-to-back-to-back speakers who talked anything from their experiences giving/taking from OSHW or running an OSHW business to more meta-questions about the ethos of OSHW. I think a lot of it ties into what we're doing in this Farm Hack community. Once I find the slides and videos of the presentations become available, I'll be sure to link them here but until then, I'll share some initial notes of mine.

Here are some kids report on using the technique we were talking about. Resolution 5 meters. Not what we want. But read the discussion after the article.

Kids Project

I've been reading the Zigbee spec sheets and it looks like the mesh networking will be introducing too much latency for accurate speed-of-light measurements between the anchor points and the ear tags. For now, we'll "turn it off" by simply not having any router nodes in the network. For security reasons, we need to be able to turn off mesh networking entirely.

Current state is that we have procured a Beagle Bone, 2 XBees and a GPS module, all of which are working.

The next steps are to:

1. Start writing code for unit testing.
2. Solve the problem of distance measurement between the anchor points and the tags.