Welcome stefan! It is so great to have you here!
I too have been inspired by regenerative agriculture. Believe it or not for me it started with a Dr Bronners soap label that I read every time I shower!
I am glad to hear you work daily with computer vision. Thatās going to be useful very soon!
This project is amazing and I hope to help in any way that I can. Iām currently a student in Mechanical Engineering at University of Minnesota. Right now Iām working on an autonomous solution for precise infrastructure trimming on golf courses. Itās a very computer vision heavy project so far, but I am looking into physical probes/sensors to gather more information about the environment. Iāve always had an interest in merging robotics with the natural world so Iām excited to see where this project goes!
-Zach
Ah thatās great! Robotics in the natural world seems to be my developing specialty (given my other robot is an off road forest explorer).
Iām building up the camera system now so hopefully your computer vision experience will come in handy!
Hi. Really nice to see this project taking shape! Iāve been having similar ideas for some time inspired by farmbot, but never liked the idea if having it locked to that small area.
Iām living in Sweden and moved to a small old farm (~3 hectares - 7.4 acres) a few months ago and have the plan to over the coming years be able to grow food to feed more than me and my partner. As Iām working with cargo bikes by trade, Iāve got some left over bike parts which Iāve used to put together a a mockup a couple of months ago.
My idea, was something a bit smaller than Acorn but I guess lots of parts and more or less all the code would be applicable to vehicles slightly different to Acorn.
First goal for me would be to get it drivable, then try to get some kind of positioning going and then aim for weeding and maybe documenting i guess.
Really looking forward to follow this and hopefully be able to contribute in some way.
I just stumbled across a 2nd hand drone with a pixhawk 4 flight controller which Iāve seen been used also for ground level rovers. Iāll probably have use for a drone for the field anyhow and thought it would be a kick start to get going with navigation faster, but it would also be nice to line up with your setup to easier be able to contribute, is there a BOM avalible, including elecronics, for the current development version?
I found the BOM for the RPIhat, but I guess there are a few other parts to get navigation going, I have motors and motorcontrollers for driving which I should be able to interface with a RPI quite easily. For steering I need to figure something out.
Hey @laschrocket that is great! Really glad youāre here.
Our Raspberry Pi Hat is the main board, however you can operate without it. The board design needs updating in my opinion. But the most important function of the board is motor control. All it is doing there is adding some serial ports and converting them to RS485. That gets converted back to normal TTL serial on the motor controller (on our custom board āodrive_aux_interfaceā), so for a smaller robot you can just use USB serial adapters and connect them up to the motor controller with no RS485, or simply connect to the motor controllers using their included USB cable.
We use Odrive motor controller. Four on the robot, one per corner. Our robot is four wheel drive four wheel steering. For your smaller robot, I wonder if differential drive would work with just two drive wheels and two passive caster wheels on the back?
We also have a fancy emergency stop circuit, but if you just feed 3.3v to GPIO8 on the Odrive motor controller with our firmware, it will clear the e-stop. However our custom firmware is pretty far behind the Odrive main branch so if you donāt need to drive brushed steering motors you may want to go with their default firmware.
Some of our stuff is still in my personal github. I should link or move some things.
Its great to meet you and I suppose if you have further questions just open a new thread. Thanks!
thanks for the clarifications. missed the 2nd hand pixhawk 4 anyhow so will definatly try to mimic you setup closely to get my project going soon 
Hi, all
This tool looks so cool and put together.
Iām currently leading a small data-cleaning and annotation team in tight collaboration with a model building team for an insur-tech startup in Michigan, but in a not too distant past life I was a farmworker on organic CSA farms in my area.
I dream solarpunk dreams and this is one of those glimpses of a world I want to live in.
Robotics is not my wheelhouse and I tend toward pragmatic simple models instead of deep learning, but Iād love to collaborate on some data munging once you are ready to share.
Also into design fiction and speculative pondering - would be pretty nice to riff on use cases.
Hello, everyone, from an Open source Ecology vet. I signed up for an account just to say hi, and that I think this is a very important business, which very few of us are engaged in. We should keep in close contact.
The open source ecology project is not dead, they are still holding workshops someoneās, and the facility is still there. Itās a multi million dollar facility, I dearly wish they had and would use it more by inviting people to work there. The founder rightly points out there must be some kind of Enterprise model, though.
Perhaps they will.
I personally am working on a machine called the manufacturetron which is a bit like a 3d printer in itās purpose, but it works differently and is capable of making highly accurate objects with smooth surfaces, fully dense, and highly detailed. It is significantly more complex than a printer, I must admit. However it is not inherently expensive.
I have a website though an organization called sensorica for the project. If you Google rugdmmac you can find it.
Sensorica is also a very important project to check out, anyone interested in this sort of thing should check it out. It is all about bringing collaborators together and making things happen. There are several notable projects under is umbrella, such as the greens for good project, to develop machinery for extracting nutrients for humans from fast, ready to grow crops like alfalfa.
My email is Anthony dot a dote douglas from the provider gmail.com. on Facebook I am Anthony Douglas, it should say I live in Cornwall, Ontario.
Hi all! Born from a peasant family in China with shortage of clothes and shoes, the only goal before my 30s was to āwash up muddy legsā and find a good career in the city, which I achieved by teaching myself to be a programmer. As I grew older, I found myself obligated to contribute back to the country people. In 2014 I joined a guy to start a company to develop IoT solutions for greenhouses, only to find that I knew absolutely nothing about agriculture.
In 2015 I encountered permaculture, and months later I started a mini CSA farm together with my girl friend (now wife) and my brother in law. My brother in law, while convalescing at home, would take care of a few pieces of land less than 0.5 acre in total, and my GF and I would visit him each Friday after our work, do whatever labour and adjustments needed in the weekends, and bring back vegetables for at least 5 families. The harvests were so abundant that we sold hundreds of pounds of sweat corns to 30+ more families, and countless extra eggplants, cucumbers, luffas, peppers, lettuces, etc. It encouraged me that by following basic principles and a little experience, one would be able to grow high quality, poison-free food with comparable output to āmodern farmingā. The farm only lasted less than 2 years due to our career changes, but I kept growing vegetables on my rooftop since then, basically covered the familyās demand except some specialities.
As promised in another thread, Iām halfway reading through the codebase. As a prototype, for sure itās far from production grade, but I can see it has a nice architecture. Sadly my expertise is on network protocols, instead of machine learning or kinematics, but Iāll learn as much as I can to contribute to this.
I learned wireless communication in vocational school. I did fix stuff in my home from fans, rice cookers, phones, all the way up to laptops and LED TV, if they can be counted as applications of electronics, but rarely soldering.
Hi Iām Sam. I grow a mixed salad on ~0.5 acre, will be doubling that over the next years. I do a deep compost mulch system, into soil-food-web, agroecology, silvoarable etc.
Iāve built a Farmbot for a customer & done some attempts at ag robots, nothing particularly successful.
Iām currently working on Rosmo Ā· GitHub which is both a toy robot & hopefully with the addition of Ethernet and the Open-Core board a completely open hardware actuator.
I work on 75cm beds, so would be interested in a smaller iteration of your platform @laschrocket are you still working on yours?
No, not much effort put into it since my post unfortunately. Iām also considering setting up a 75cm market garden style field at my place though, but have had to put focus more into restoring the buildings and such at the place weāve moved to, but itās still on my todo list!
I realized more and more that its probably needed with some tool for doing also a bit heavier work and while doing some research I found this;
which is a i bit odd, and feels more as a proof of concept than a commercial product, but I kind of like the layout and the idea of combining a vehicle that can both do some semi heavy lifting like logs or pulling a trailer with compost as well as act as a base for sensors and light tillage.
I recently got one of these for free;
so I thought of reusing some parts from it for a electric farm vehicle.
Welcome everyone!
@Merlin, @sam_uk, @laschrocket, it is so nice to have you here!
Merlin you have been killing it on the open source contributions, thank you so much!
Sam Rosmo is so cute! Glad to have you here. I hope our hardware or software will be of some use for your projects! Currently Acorn works great with 30" (75cm) beds with 18" (45cm) walkways. But we are working on a modular corner design for our kit release that will make it easier to make the vehicle whatever size you desire.
Linus, that machine looks like a beast! Acorn would to well towing it I think, and we are working on a video where we show off Acorn towing a lawn mower. We are also planning to design custom tools that go inside the frame. Maybe that tool would work for that too!
Hi, Nick Fankhauser here. A computer geek by profession & sustainable gardener/farmer by avocation. Located in Oxford Ohio. Our automation ambitions are on a much simpler level, such as keeping the chicken coop running in the absence of people. Iām also working on monitoring our beehives remotely so I can get away with fewer inspections. Nothing on the scale of your monumental project, but smaller kin. Iāll be a friendly lurker most of the time, since Iām not really qualified to have an opinion on most robotics topics, but Iām eager to learn by observing as time allows.
I am YOK in south Korea.
I am a hobby farmer of a small field around 1500 meters square and an HW/SW engineer.
I hope to join and contribute to the community projects as I can.
Hello everyone. I hope Iām not late to the party 
My name is Adebayo and I am from Nigeria https://twitter.com/baniagribiz
I have a bachelors degree in Agricultural extension and rural development. I have been practicing agriculture since 2014 but mostly in a convectional way and small scale. I was able to get 6 acres of land where I grow vegetables, maize and cassava. I upscaled production in 2018. As an extension worker/change agent, my goal is to pass on relevant agricultural information, modern agricultural practices to farmers and rural dwellers. This is will help improve their yield and productivity.
āMy vision is to help develop rural communities through agricultureā. Agriculture is Africa, Nigeria is still very far behind when it comes to adopting new agricultural innovation.
One of my goal this year is to impact rural dwellers on digitization in agriculture. But more focus will be on primary/elementary school students and secondary/high school students.
Part of the challenges Iām having right now is this.
I am not a tech person, but Iām tech savvy.
So Iām trying to figure out how I can help this young ones with Agtech courses that can help - As regards this. I have been able to come up with a few stuffs after brainstorming with a friend of mine.
I have been able to get the module for the school kids, this will enable me to work around their existing curriculum while I include basic tech about agriculture. Things they can implement while on the field. (Practical)
Digitalization creates demand for digital skills and for people who are competent in using digital devices, understanding outputs and developing programmes and applications. This requires not only basic literacy and numeracy but also data handling and communication skills. These skills are lacking in the rural areas in Nigeria, hene, education must improve quickly; ICT is developing at an incredibly rapid pace and rates of learning must keep up. This will help prevent the issue of Digital divide
There is a need to develop a model of digital skills training aimed at rural dwellers so they can learn to assess and implement the best practices and technologies from their homes/farm businesses.
Iām in contact with a few of my friends who will be willing to volunteer as teachers to help sensitive and impact the younger generation.
I will be very happy to connect with everyone here. I have shared a link to my twitter profile. there you can see more of my work. I will be happy to share more about the project I am working on presently to whoever is interested in solving the sustainable development goals 1,2,4 and 11
Zero Hunger, No poverty, Quality Education and Sustainable cities and communities.
Hello to the community!
Iām Avi. Iāve been lurking on here for a while and finally decided to make an account in hopes of finding a way to be useful to this project.
@taylor Iād love to get in contact and find a way to get involved. Iām especially interested in the new motor controller! Here are two examples of projects I did recently with Edge Impulse that can give you an idea of what Iām into:
If this is relevant Iām available @ avi(dot)robots(at)gmail(dot)com
Hi Taylor, Everyone,
As so kindly already expressed;-
Thank you so much for furthering organic farming science and making your robot open source! Those are important contributions to the world and I appreciate it.
I work in IT for over 20yrs, grown from engineering to Project mgt, Program management and Product Ownership. I am setting up my Permaculture regenerative farm of about 50 acres - early stages. We faced devastating bushfires a couple years back, recovering slowly. Based in Sydney, Australia and north midcoast.
I too have been researching and drafting regenerative farm automation solutions including a tractor platform to assist Permaculture and Regenerative farming small scale producers and the Permaculture global community. Iām familiar with home automation systems, networking, tech infra, cloud/big data, systems integrations, automation systems, dabble in coding, DJI drone/ODM, sketchup and general engineering. So have a good understanding of wide range of technology disciplines and architecture, but really these days Iām just a Project Manager with some good tech know how, strategy and product mgt. Iāve seen first hand how large food retailers work vertically and the insecurity small and medium farmers face. The environmental and social damage. It all must change and globally, we are out of time.
Iām a Permaculture designer and been helping farmer mates with pro-bono consultancy to help them be more self sufficient and sustainable.
Really looking forward to collaborating with you all and helping bring this together to really help bring about some security and prosperity for all, (Sarbat Dha Bhalla) in the field of progressive social Ag and communities.
Warm regards,
RajD
Hello RajD. I have sure enjoyed learning about you and what youāre working on. Iād be happy to connect with you to further discuss about the area of permaculture. Iām working on a project presently which will be focused on teaching kids in rural areas of Nigeria how to grow food sustainably.
Hello Merlin, Nice to meet you and learn about your journey in the area of agriculture. I will be happy to learn more about you and how you successfully ran the operations of your the farm while it was active. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Iām Brian Sakurada. Iām a computer engineer turned regenerative farmer in Japan and I came across this project while searching for solutions to build my own similar thing. You can see some of the bits of land Iām dealing with on my farm website or instagram page for Shiwa GREEN Farm.
Iād like to get involved and help out and in the process, get some automation built for my farm.
