Raspberry Pi Smart Vertical Farming Takes Veggies To New Heights (tomshardware.com) 45
Tanay Tanay has developed a smart vertical farming system using a Raspberry Pi 4 as the central controller, with features such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support for remote plant monitoring, precise automated watering based on moisture levels, and environmental factor tracking. Tom's Hardware reports: The end result is a Pi-powered system with tons of cool goodies to take your plant care to the next level. Tanay is able to monitor all sorts of environmental factors like how much light is available, how moist the air is, how much water is in the soil, what the temperature is and much more. The icing on the cake is a user-friendly interface that can be used to manually water the plants.
The main board for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4 B. It's connected to an Arduino Nano R3 which is assigned to a specific plant. Some of the sensors confirmed in the design are a soil moisture sensor, an ambient light sensor as well as a water level depth detection sensor. You could always add more or take away modules depending on what you want to do with your vertical farm. For example, a camera could be used to log plant growth progress over time. Tanay explains that ThingSpeak, an IoT platform, was used in the project design. You can learn more about this Raspberry Pi project at Hackster.
The main board for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4 B. It's connected to an Arduino Nano R3 which is assigned to a specific plant. Some of the sensors confirmed in the design are a soil moisture sensor, an ambient light sensor as well as a water level depth detection sensor. You could always add more or take away modules depending on what you want to do with your vertical farm. For example, a camera could be used to log plant growth progress over time. Tanay explains that ThingSpeak, an IoT platform, was used in the project design. You can learn more about this Raspberry Pi project at Hackster.
So. it's "AI Vertical Farming" (Score:4, Insightful)
You forgot to call it "AI".
I thought you wanted to make money?
Previous attempts: Blockchain Vertical Farming, 3D Printed Vertical Farming, ...
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I'm wondering how much it costs to run the grow lights for all the levels except the top one.
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That's pretty much what I'd expect, especially with the rising cost of electric service. You might minimize that by letting it be dark during peak hours, but that's an awful lot of idle time you've still got to provide water (which ain't free), not to mention the building.
Folks with just a homeowner's electric service have zero clue how much a large service costs, let alone how much water goes into produce sufficiently profitable to even think about such a venture. And how few calories you get per dollar of
TWO small plants are now a farm?! (Score:4, Interesting)
The small pumps (specifically these models) and moisture sensors are made since years and sold in the usual places, including Amazon. The code is on github. Bought a kit of 4 and used 3 of them (for much bigger plants, and a much bigger "far" in the end) when I was gone in my last vacation. By the way, the plastic tubes you see fit on the pumps, they won't stay like that forever, the pumps will push them out eventually and of course that sucks if you leave stuff on their own. I'd need to either glue them or put some tiny metal collar on them, if I can find some (maybe a zip tie, or two thin ones might be enough too).
What's next, an article that someone bought a smart plug and is controlling a lamp from WiFi?
What sorcery is this? (Score:2)
A lamp that ignites by a command that floats on air? What silliness.
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I'd need to either glue them or put some tiny metal collar on them
A hose clamp? I have a couple of stainless steel clamps that hold down on the irrigation hose that moves water from source to my backyard garden's sprinkler. Ideally, if you're coming off a pump get a pump with a flared pipe. That is a part of the pipe towards the opening is made a larger diameter than the rest of the pipe. Put some water tight sealant right behind the flared bit, read the directions for how long it needs to cure. While it is curing, put your PVC hose onto the pump well past the flared
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"A hose clamp?"
Yes, they were invented for that purpose.
In the olden times, when we still had ICE cars, the motors were full of them.
These young whippersnappers never saw one.
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In the olden times, when we still had ICE cars, the motors were full of them
Last I checked EVs had them as well. Not just for the heat pump system that cools/warms the vehicle, but batteries in pretty much all the EVs that I know about are actively cooled. The batteries lifetimes would be stupid bad without the cooling.
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"tiny metal collar"
The name you're looking for is "hose clamp." They're clamps for hoses. You can find them at any hardware store.
Fruity Computing (Score:2)
What the public will understand from this article:
You can run your farm with an Apple based controller, but if you want to be certified Open Source, you need a Raspberry to make the pies.
Alternatively: this is something about "server farms" that run the Internet, somewhere up in a cloud. I've heard of this! Vertically Integrated Systems, right? So they're making actual pancake stacks now? (Why is it news, though? My nephew told me that it was The Year Of Linux for those server thingies, a long time ago when
We used RPis in vertical farming commercially (Score:4, Informative)
I worked at a vertical (hydroponic) farming start up that raised a couple hundred million in funding, valued at over a billion, unicorn and all that. The controllers in the farms themselves were RPi class machines that talked to Google's IoT service. They were manufactured to order (no video ports, for example), always online via LTE modems, and they were stable and did their jobs well.
Re:We used RPis in vertical farming commercially (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We used RPis in vertical farming commercially (Score:4, Informative)
The vertical farm concept is so stupid that I thought it was a joke the first time I heard it.
Why use expensive urban real estate, electric lights, and pumped water to replace rural farmland, free sunshine, and rain?
The only plausible saving is transporting the harvested crop, but that is vastly outweighed by transporting water and fertilizer, plus all the commuting done by people who can't live in the city because we built a high-rise farm instead of apartments.
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Why use expensive urban real estate, electric lights, and pumped water to replace rural farmland, free sunshine, and rain?
1) Depending on location, urban real estate can be cheaper than farmland, especially where there are many vacant or underutilized buildings
2) Compare cost of lights (when needed) to the cost of fuel, tires, maintenance, and so on for farm equipment
3) Vertical farming can be used year round
4) You have a controlled environment in vertical farming compared to farmland. This means not having
Re:We used RPis in vertical farming commercially (Score:5, Informative)
1. Farmland is getting expensive but unless you're planning on investing in kevlar or naurto-dodging bullets, rural land is cheaper.
2. You're powering those lights with what, mystical fairy farts? Solar panels or grid power cost a lot of money, though I do use small scale solar for microcontrollers
3. So can any standard greenhouse, and I can arduino control that too... Honestly RasPI4's are massive overkill.
4. Pest management isn't the insane amount of poison that Greenpeace would have you believe. Maintaining your soil ecology is a first step to avoiding most pests. Growing plants that attract beneficial insects around your garden does a surprising amount to stop pests. For larger rodent pests owl boxes work wonders.
5. fertilizer isn't measured by acre, it's measured by plant consumption. If you're growing less plants then you will use less fertilizer. If you grow more plants you will use more fertilizer. Most plants (I could get into cover cropping here, but choose not to) deplete the soil. Sustainable farming uses a lot of compost, bone meal, blood meal, feather meal, etc. which are waste products from other local farms.
6. you still haven't gotten around the HUGE power bill that comes with vertical farming. Making this approach carbon neutral vs row cropping is non-trivial. Farm equipment is run a lot less and pollutes a lot less than you think vs what is harvested. On most row crop farms a field is cultivated, seeded (sometimes both of these are done in one pass), sprayed, harvested, and tilled in a year. That's 5-6 passes of a tractor over a field in a year. Most large row-crop farms are planting swaths of 40-50' width each pass. This means that with the right equipment a farmer on his tractor can plant, fertilize, or harvest, thousands of acres a day. In exchange for running a diesel engine roughly equivalent to that in a Jeep Grand Cherokee diesel, with better pollution controls, for 14 hours 5 times a year, you get 1000 acres of corn...
Look, I get it, cityfolk are scared of big row crop farms because greenpeace says you need to be scared. Why not go meet a farmer and find out where your food really comes from.
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You still haven't gotten around the HUGE power bill that comes with vertical farming. Making this approach carbon neutral vs row cropping is non-trivial. Farm equipment is run a lot less and pollutes a lot less than you think vs what is harvested.
And you haven't acknowledged that vertical farming has one HUGE advantage that justifies the power bill: the transportation costs associated with rural agriculture.
Vertical farming lets you grow shrimp in rural Minnesota [wctrib.com] and salad greens in Singapore [globetrender.com], which cuts d
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> that justifies the power bill: the transportation costs associated with rural agriculture.
That's spending dollars to save pennies. For the cost of running heat grow lamps to illuminate all the plants for the entire growing season, you could ship the crops by jet plane, which is NOT how they actually get transported in the real world, because that would be absurd.
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Shipping is cheap. Very cheap. Giant climate controlled warehouses are expensive. It's much cheaper and more efficient to ship tomatoes to Minnesota rather than grow tomatoes in giant climate controlled greenhouses in Minnesota. I can only see vertical farming making sense for some easily-perishable ingredients used in elite restaurants, where the cost is of less concern than absolute freshness (and maybe even part of the appeal).
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Only in rare special situations, not in general, not in the long term, and never in the kind of quantity that would ever allow a "vertical farm" setup to meaningfully compete with a traditional agribusiness, even for one growing season.
> 2) Compare cost of lights (when needed) to the cost of fuel, tires, maintenance,
> and so on for farm equipment
You're thinking "lights" in the sense of "enough light for humans to see," which
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Container farming is an attractive concept because not only do you save the transportation fuel, you save the transportation time. Fresh food to your plate, no delay.
With regards to water, the idea is to keep it as closed to close cycle as possible, so you only have to add water that exits the system in the form of harvested plant. You don't just drain it away as it works through the soil (or whatever substrate you're using).
Because it's a sealed unit, you also don't have to worry about pesticides or rand
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When the plants you are growing are easily recognised as being illegal to grow then having everything indoors is kinda essential if you want to avoid attracting the attention of the local police. The electricity is FoC and the real estate tends to be of questionable provenance as well.
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The only plausible saving is transporting the harvested crop,
Vertical farming is completely viable and a number of businesses are doing it successfully.
However, they are growing high-value crops which don't travel well near the point of consumption.
The poster child for this type of agriculture (cannabis aside) is salad greens. High end salad mixes are extremely high dollar items. But if you transport them any distance then you inevitably wind up with a lot of waste.
but that is vastly outweighed by transporting water and fertilizer
Water is transported through the existing water system, the same way it gets to the toilet you apparent
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FWIW, I don't think vertical farming *needs* to be hydroponic. It's just that it developed out of hydroponic farming. But that approach does enable better standardization. (But I think I've also seen intensive cultivation of tomatoes on trays of sand. That's not exactly hydroponic, but it also wasn't a vertical farm.)
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Sure, you can do successions of microgreens in trays of dirt if you want. But it's messy.
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Control of pests for one thing. Climate control for another. Indoor farming can be very profitable, but it requires the right crop. Poinsettas are a classic, but also mushrooms, some spices. People here grow vegetables during the winter.
Growing lettuce indoors in California seems kind of silly.
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Vertical Farming has a few use cases (Score:2)
This whole vertical farm concept seems to be a way to raise sometimes very large sums of money, do some stuff, and then go bankrupt. Everyone involved gets paid a salary or consulting fees, and there's some fun stuff, but at the end the investors get slaughtered to pay for it. Here's the headline to a recent article about this: "As indoor farming startups with hundreds of millions in funding head to bankruptcy, critic says: ‘Boy, this is a dumb idea’"
It is only a dumb idea if you're competing directly with a real farm on low cost crops on cost alone. Ever eat a fresh strawberry? They taste MUCH better than anything you'll eat a grocery store because fresh strawberries are delicate and don't keep during transport. A lot of produce cannot be picked in its freshest state as its intended to be shipped across country or across the world. They often pick it green and ripen it artificially with ethylene gas or some other process. It's good, but not as goo
Re: We used RPis in vertical farming commercially (Score:2)
Prior art (Score:3)
Home Assistant (Score:4, Informative)
No need to make one from scratch just install Home Assistant on the PI and then connect whatever smart sensors you have (WiFI, Zigbee, ZWave) and you have yourself a nice automatic monitoring system with a nice online dashboard.
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Or gain a few extra geek points and use OpenHAB ;-)
Why the fuck is this aggregated here? (Score:2, Offtopic)
I already have this, this is news? (Score:2)
An Arduino R3 per plant? (Score:2)
Be cheaper to just buy your product at the market.
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I'd use an ESP, probably an old school ESP3266 if I just wanted to read some sensors and control some valves, or an ESP32 if I wanted to add in a camera. You can easily get ESP32-CAM kits cheaper than an R3. ESP32s can do large mesh networks with PainlessMesh. (Expressif says you can do networks up to 1000 nodes with ESP-MDF, but that's only "chain" type "mesh" networks, which are arguably not actual meshes.)
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Demonstration a bit ...underwhelming (Score:2)
Looks like a words-for-hire project. While the needs are real, I don't think the project has much of a handle on the state-of-the-art.
Too bad about Pi 5 Audio Jack (Score:2)
RPi is a solid system (Score:2)
But this is hardly ground-breaking work... I've been doing this commercially with the RPi for over 7 years. Anecdotally, based on almost a thousand systems, the MTBF I've seen is over 73 YEARS for the RPi, and even then most of the failures were due to external factors like shorts and lightning strikes, etc. It's a solid system, and rock solid. Having a full Linux stack to work with is nice too - there's nothing we haven't been able to do.
Mmmh (Score:2)
Ok, I know I'm not supposed to RTFA, but its photos can be characterized as horizontal farming, at best.