brshute

Good idea Dorn, I just put up a tools page about this project, [http://www.farmhack.org/tools/electric-tractor-conversion](http://www.farmhack.org/tools/electric-tractor-conversion) I don't know how to upload the sketchup file of my Allis G, do you know how?

Hi Grant-- Let me know when you have a graphic for the event and/or rsvp and/or schedule and I will put together a page at farmhack.org/iowa for the event and link to it from the front page. You can send it to farmhack@youngfarmers.org

Hi Ed, glad to have you here. I think your comment resonates with a lot of us who have been active in getting the Farm Hack project together. Our definition of "tool" has been pretty broad and there has been discussion that to solve a certain task (say, deep tillage) one might use a mechanical tool (yeoman plow) or a biological/management tool (tillage radish). Don't hesitate to contribute "tools" and discussion that fit into the latter category!

Using the cell phone to program it sounds great. In thinking through the interface let's keep in mind that the basic text plan for the phone has 200 messages/ month so people will probably want to try to keep below their limit, although I'm sure some users will be fine with paying a little more to get more updates, etc. Louis I like the idea of being able to program lots of variables with one text using commas. Maybe an added feature could be coming up with a little web interface to make this more intuitive-- farmer could plug in the variables into a form (fill in box for upper limit, lower, limit, check box for updates daily, hourly, etc) which would generate a text message to the Fido coded properly, using some kind of online SMS tool? I don't know enough about this to know if it would work, or how it could work, just an idea. Or, the web form could just generate a series of numbers/characters for the farmer to then text to Fido, which Fido would understand-- just a way to make the inputting more user friendly.

In thinking about our default listing / tool organization let's think about who our average user will be and why they are visiting the site. Hopefully our average user is a farmer who is looking for a solution to an issue on the farm. Ideally that user will also be a contributor to the site in terms of tool development; but the vast majority will be arriving because they are looking for information first-- and hopefully they will be contributing info through forum posts, questions, and maybe tool posts later. Just think about Wikipedia, and what percentage of users arrive to find information vs. to contribute information. So if I am arriving at Farm Hack because I heard it could be a good place to find a solution to a problem on my farm, the default tool organization that I want to see would be tools by category, so I can find tools that are relevant to my farm or my problem (fruit growing tools aren't much use if I'm a dairy farmer, etc.). It's also nice to be able to sort to see tools displayed other ways, for example those of us on the Farm Hack development team clearly are interested in seeing tools sorted by level of development, but I think it's not the most relevant thing at all to the average user.