FarmBot: A journey into digital gardening

“FarmBot will be the best farmer for any crop and any location at any time of year”

Welcome to the world of FarmBot where technology meets agriculture. Have you ever imagined what it would be like gardening without getting your boots stuck in the mud? Introducing…FarmBot! This robotic tech can plant, water and nurture your crops until harvest - all through the use of a savvy app - with just one click.

In this episode, we’re in California to meet Rory Aronson, founder of FarmBot - who shares how this innovative device is reshaping the farming landscape. We get a demo of FarmBot, learn how open source tech is empowering users to create their own tools and hear how Rory wants the FarmBot to be the next must have home appliance.

We also hear from Jon Hirschtick, who heads up PTC’s Onshape division and he explains the importance of Onshape and how Farmbot have benefitted from this software.

Find out more about FarmBot here.

Find out more about Onshape here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukena. Location recording by Victoria Shifflett. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where we're sowing the seeds for robot gardening.

I'm your host, Paul Hames from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical, and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology.

Today, we're diving into the realm of FarmBot, a ground-breaking innovation that's changing the game in home gardening. Picture this, a robot friend that not only alerts you to the perfect time for harvest, but also determines the ripeness of individual crops, like carrots and tomatoes. Rory Aronson is the visionary behind FarmBot, and in this episode he gives our producer, Victoria Shifflett, a demo, showing her how FarmBot easily nurtures crops with precision.

What's also impressive is that Is that tech is open source, so users are now developing their own tools to complement the FarmBot system. So the opportunities for how FarmBot may be used over the next few years are endless.

Hey, my name is Rory. Welcome to FarmBot. Uh, this is our 5, 000 square foot warehouse here in San Luis Obispo. So let me show you around. This is the main warehouse floor of FarmBot Inc. Um, we've got pallet racks filled with the FarmBot product. It comes fully pre-packaged, ready to ship out to the customer.

So there's several hundred FarmBots, uh, up in the pallet racks right now. And then all of these FarmBot machines on the warehouse floor are test equipment. So when we are developing the next version of the hardware. We build a complete version of that, that new FarmBot, and then we can test it here on the warehouse floor.

We can do cycles running them back and forth. We can test out how easy it is to assemble if that's the main focus, we can test the functionality of the tools and implements of the FarmBot.

So I had the idea for the FarmBot. Uh, a little more than halfway through my studies and I wrote this paper about 50 page paper describing all of the whole technology. And then I took that and I published it online and I said, you know, who wants to help with this? This is my idea. Uh, and I need a team of people to help.

So I need, you know, I can bring the, the hardware side, but I need people who are experienced with software. Uh, people who are excited about this and, and also share that vision of a home appliance that can grow food for you. The FarmBot moves around, forward and backwards, left and right, up and down, and it's mounted on top of your typical raised garden bed, five feet by ten feet, roughly.

Then it will plant seeds, it will water, it will measure the soil moisture to determine how much to water. It has a camera to take pictures and track your plant growth and plant health, and it can also identify where the weeds are, and it has a built-in weed whacker so it can move around and once it finds where the weeds are, it can go and buzz them out.

It's all controlled by a little computer built inside, and that talks over the Wi Fi with an application or an app that you can load up on your phone or your computer. And you can control your garden and monitor it from anywhere in the world. For the most part, uh, you can set it up on autopilot. So once you get the seeds in the ground, uh, with the FarmBot, it can just take care of everything for the next two or three months.

And it will send you an email when the tomatoes are ripe or when the carrots are ready for harvest. So, what we're working towards is a fully automated gardening system that can live in your backyard year round and grow fresh food for you at home, uh, with very little ongoing effort by you. Uh, one other component is the tool bays.

So, the tool bays are mounted usually on One of the short edges of the bed and in there is far much different tools. So the, the farmer has a universal tool mount which has magnets in it and it can pick up and dismount the tools as needed depending on the task that it's doing. So, the included tools are the watering nozzle, the seed injector, the soil sensor, and the rotary tool, which is like our little miniature weed whacker. And so the FarmBot can, uh, basically do automatic tool changes, you know, just like you might pick up a shovel or the hose or a trowel, depending on what you're doing in the garden. And it can move around and use those tools to do work on the garden and the plants.

Okay. So we're standing here in front of a FarmBot. Uh, this is a test machine, so it's a little smaller than normal. Uh, so I'm going to press this button here, and it's going to tell the FarmBot to go to the home position.

And what it's doing is its first moving the Z axis all the way up, so it's going to get the FarmBot and the tool head out of the way of any plants. And then it's going to move the Y axis over to the home position, and then the whole gantry along the bed to the other, um, home position for the X axis. So normally, you would program all this stuff to run kind of on a calendar of events.

Um, so you would, you would specify that you want the FarmBot to do these operations, you know, the weeding every, every day at 6am. Uh, but in this case, I'm just gonna load up the application here and sort of manually initiate these actions. Um, let's see here. So I have a sequence that is called mount tool, and I'm going to specify to mount the rotary tool.

I want to click run. The FarmBot will first move the X and Y axes to above the rotary tool, and then it's going to move the universal tool mount and the whole Z axis down. And once the tool is attached, uh, the FarmBot makes an electrical connection with the tool. And so it can verify that the tool is correctly attached.

And now the FarmBot can send power, in this case, to activate the motor for the weed whacking ability. Or, in the case of the soil sensor, it can read the data from the sensor. People can 3D print and make their own tools for custom applications. So one of, one of our customers, for example, has developed a carrot harvesting machine.

tool. Um, another customer has put onto the end here, uh, an additional camera that has several servo motors and it can be rotated around in all directions so they can take pictures of their plants from a side angle or almost underneath the plant to kind of view the canopy of the, of the leaves. A major component of publishing was that I was making The whole idea of FarmBot open source, it's the opposite sort of philosophy of this is my idea.

I own it and no one else can do anything with it. Only me. Instead, the open-source philosophy is this is everyone's idea. It's in the public domain. If you want to build this, if you want to modify it, if you want to use the idea for commercial purposes or for research or just in your own backyard. Or to build a company.

You can totally do any of that stuff. And that was a, a major part that resonated with people. Food is important for everyone. Everyone needs to eat. It's not like a luxury item that you can go without. And one farmer's success is, uh, the success of the whole community. You know, growing up, it was always, there was always something to tinker and build and invent.

So my room was filled with little gadgets and things that I had cobbled together just from an idea. So yeah, lots of projects, uh, across the gamut, you know, everything from little RC cars and planes to things in my room to help me turn the light switches on and off from across the room to, uh, uh, boards and bicycles and things like that.

They all, uh, in some small way contribute to my knowledge and understanding of materials and uh, mechanics and electronics to some degree and work their way sort of in my work today. Uh, and that's kind of how Farbot came along. I had an idea for what I describe as a 3D printer for the garden and, uh, I went and Google searched and thought, wow, surprise, this doesn't exist yet.

So from that, I just started working on it. I started, uh, making CAD models. I started building a prototype just in the, in the shed. Um, and then things just kind of snowballed from there. My dad is a mechanical engineer. So I very much took after him. He's been self-employed for as long as I've known. And I've always seen what he's been able to do as a, you know, a goal and aspiration, being able to work for yourself, being able to have a flexible schedule, uh, and that's, you know, set the stage for building a company like this and building a product like FarmBot that has, uh, it's big mix of robotics, hardware engineering design.

There's over, um. 1, 000 components in every FarmBot kit, over a hundred of them are unique, and those span the range from aluminium to stainless steel to plastics to circuit boards to little motors and cables, and all of that needs to come together. with software with data into one complete functioning product.

So, so the long-term vision of the FarmBot is we want to have a home appliance for the garden. Uh, most people have in their home, a refrigerator, they have a washing machine and a dryer, they have a microwave, and these are appliances that have been sort of honed to do these specific things for us. And they kind of work in the background.

You don't really think about having to preserve your food you just put it in the fridge, and it keeps it preserved. You don't really have to think too much about Washing your clothes because you can put it in the machine. You can turn a knob, pour in some detergent, press go, and it's ready in two hours.

All of these appliances add a lot of value and convenience, uh, to our lives and free us up to do other things that are more fulfilling or less tedious or that we're more passionate about. Gardening does take a lot of work. And so I think there's a very big opportunity to have some technology that is like a home appliance that can work in the background and can grow the garden for somebody sort of on autopilot.

And then you get to reap the benefit without having to put in that like constant ongoing work. Um, That maybe isn't your passion project. The other, the other fun parts of, of the work is again, seeing people run with the open-source aspect by making stuff available online, you really just don't know what people are going to come up with.

And, and people have all sorts of interesting ideas, passions, uh, unique use cases and problems. So we've seen, um, you know, university teams develop special tools. And then, you know, also people do kind of off the wall out there, things that we never would have imagined. Uh, up in San Francisco, there's a non-profit, uh, working to adapt the FarmBot to grow coral for restoration in the ocean.

So, rather than having a raised bed of soil and growing vegetables, they have a tank of water, uh, seawater, that has coral. shards, um, in the tank attached to these special scaffolds. And then the FarmBot, they mounted their own high-def camera with this, uh, like big bubble dome thing. And it allows it to submerge the camera under the water and take a picture of the coral plants and identify, you know, they then send the data to their own software and they can use a AI system to identify coral diseases and, um, You know, essentially automate a lot of what has historically been a very labour intensive aspects of coral production.

I would say, you know, FarmBot is not a better farmer than somebody who's experienced. One day I think it will be though. I think it will actually be the best Um, for any crop, any location, any time of year. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of innovation and, and opportunity to make that a reality. You know, as much as I want to see the, the FarmBot as the home appliance, what's actually more exciting is, That next step which is the FarmBot as the hub of your homestead You know We've a lot of us have a google home or an Alexa or Siri Device in the house and it can control the lights and play music and stuff like that I want to see those types of interfaces also be able to access the FarmBot and your entire cottage core backyard ecosystem.

I want to be able to ask Siri, when are the apples going to be ripe in the backyard? What's the temperature of the compost? And should I turn it over to this weekend? Or should I wait longer? There are X number of tomatoes ready to pick. Here's a recipe. for, you know, a delicious breakfast that you can make with what you have on your property right now.

That, I think, is sort of the ultimate vision of the FarmBot, is it really helping you maximize nature hyper locally.

That was Rory Aronson, teaching us all about FarmBot's mission of making gardening more accessible for all. Now it's time to meet our expert, John Hirschtick from PTC. John, to design the FarmBot Genesis, Rory chose Onshape, PTC's cloud native CAD and PDM platform. We've spoken many times about Onshape in past episodes, and I know in this instance that Rory found the ability to share files really important to the success of Genesis.

Are you able to give an overview as to how Onshape enabled this? And what are the benefits it offered? 

Uh, FarmBot's core development team, they work internally on new improvements before they release them to the wider open-source community around the world. When they're working on new improvements, our simultaneous editing tools, which allow multiple people to collaborate on the same model, same parts, same assemblies at the same time, they've been especially valuable as the core FarmBot team is spread out between North America and Europe.

FarmBot found shifting to Onshape was very much like the shift from old desktop, file based, installed word processing to Onshape. To modern cloud native word processing with Google docs. All of a sudden, the power of real time collaboration is unlocked with any other CAD and PDM system. You have to install software, be on the right computing platform, maybe export files, import them, lock them.

Sometimes you lose design intent. Or you get confused about which file is the actual one you want to refer to. That can't happen in Onshape. The engineers can edit the same document simultaneously and everyone's able to watch or provide feedback. They're in the same workspace and they can update parts while someone is updating the assembly and others updated the drawings all in real time, seeing everyone's changes at the same time.

When they need to get parts that are manufacturers or need to make a prototype in the 3d printer. They do things a lot faster in Onshape. In fact, Onshape has meant at least a 50 to 100 percent increase in productivity, as opposed to the old CAD workflows they had, where only a single person can access a document at a time, and they have to lock everyone out, and everyone's confused about it as the latest version.

So big benefits for Onshape.

Thanks to John for his insight, Rory Aronson for showing us his dedication to a greener future, and to Victoria Shifflett for taking us behind the scenes of FarmBot. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our bi weekly Third Angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts, and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive Producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukena. Location recording by Victoria Shifflett. And music by Rowan Bishop.