Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product. Who is the customer? If you like gardening, why would you pay thousands of dollars so that you don't need to do it? If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you.
I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spending time outside, working with their hands, being involved with the food they eat and saving a bit of money. Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
On an industrial scale this thing is of course totally useless.
It took steam engines 100 years to reliably outperform horses. Maybe in 100 years the situation will be different. Until then, I might buy one because I want to tinker with it. After all, it's 100 years of tinkering that got us there with steam engines.
> Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product.
Couldn't you say that about half the stuff posted here?
To me that's the "product" - an interesting engineering project targeted at people like us; a starting point for learning that can be taken further and those advancements potentially fed back into it, like all good open source projects.
As that kind of product, similar to a large chunk everything else built around RPi's and arduino's posted here (and... celebrated), it looks great to me and I don't get the hate. I was really excited to see it.
> Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
The same reason they want the many, often entirely pointless automations posted here daily, only this is not just fun, but also useful?
If this actually produces enough consumable food reliably (idk if it does, and be nice to see criticism along that angle), maybe also the cost could be justified?
IIRC it's ~$3K for the base model, seems it could pay for itself in a year or so if it could supply a years worth of fresh veges to a couple of people, depending on the local cost (which can vary a lot).
I think this is a fairly valid point. From my own anecdotal perspective I don’t much like “gardening” but when we wanted to grow vegetables we did research enough to know that this product is basically a waste of money. If you want a self-watering system you’re going to go with that, and maybe even have some fish for cleaning. If you just want easy low maintenance vegetables you can build a raised bed and water it with a hose on evenings during a dry period. That’s basically all you need to do.
I’ve removed a ton of weeds from between our tiles, I’ve removed exactly three from the raised bed. The watering takes like 30 seconds a few nights a week. The real trick is to plant something with a high output and no maintenance required like squash.
I agree that the watering adapter is basically pointless when this thing is built on a raised bed. You can build the watering into the base of the bed with a simple water level sensor and let capillary action wick the water up to the roots.
The gantry design is limited for sure, but extending it into a more independent system might be possible, and the software they wrote to manage crops could potentially be quite useful with a more general system. It seems like a final v1 for a "farm bot".
Nothing you wrote in this or the original post implies that people who don't like gardening wouldn't want to have a garden on their own property managed by a robot.
Having a product for gardening and selling it to people who don't like gardening is genuinely retarded. With this robot you still have to do gardening, only somewhat less.
If you don't like gardening why would you spend 2k on a robot doing it for you instead of buying the produce?
You seem to be struggling with the idea that someone might want the results of hard work without actually doing that hard work, especially if they can get those results by playing with something they do enjoy, like robotics. Let me know when that sinks in.
Are you aware of supermarkets? There you can buy food that others have produced for you, admission to a supermarket is usually free and food can be bought in minutes instead of produced over months.
Is this your project? Why are you so emotional over it being a shit product?
It might be difficult, but maybe strain your imagination to consider scenarios where people live remotely, off grid, or in areas with unreliable supply chains, or they might even live right next door to be more self-sufficient. Accepting that other people might have different values than you can be challenging, but I have confidence you can do it.
Farm bot is allegedly open source, so you have access to every part of the design. If you're building some to use off grid, you're a DIYer and are already relying on yourself for many things. You can also stock spare parts when you do the initial build.
The initial build will require shipping parts to a location for pickup, but this is a rare event.
He's going to blow his mind when he learns I have two AeroGardens in my kitchen, but don't want to do any farming. I could just hop down to the grocery store to buy the same amount in minutes. I can't believe the company is still in business!
I want higher quality food than my local supermarket. Tomatoes are work to grow but what you can buy is awful. I wouldn't use this for wheat as I can't tell any difference.
They have these things called farmers' markets where you can buy fresh produce and it's much cheaper than $4000. You could probably buy fresh produce for a whole year and not have it come to that total. A year's worth of food is likely more than the robot could produce in your lifetime, so the market is a much better deal.
So in your mind, economics is the only value worth considering. So I suppose that entails that you were paid to write your reply to my comment? Why else would you bother engaging on this site if you're not getting some monetary deal out of it?
When it comes to buying things, I would say yes. I could buy an expensive robot to grow a small amount of fresh food for me, or I could buy the same fresh food for much cheaper from a farmer. The former has little appeal when the latter exists.
You are wrong. Industrually one can have one of these to work for perhaps 50 beds that go in a conveyor belt or a single large belt conveyor. One would then need only the small version.
Hire an accoutant. Research where humans consume unusually lots of fresh produce, ensure it works with one bed for that produce, buy a warehouse (near where most Uber Eats users are), and set up a conveyor belt that will be expanded over time. Engineering friend would help with this. While waiting for first produce & collecting data, work on branding, buy fake accounts & hire group of third-country freelancers with Good English to do your marketing, make a media plan ("interview" plan), work on photography, and research Uber Eats, GrubHub, DoorDash matters (talk to them on phone, figure out the most cost-effective still good looking & functional packaging etc.), and reach out to popular cafes (especially popular chains) to get them use your below-profitably sold produce in exchange for attention (ghost restaurants may also be interested).
The profit comes either B2C or B2B (probably a fallback). You sell fresh, consistently high-quality local produce at low cost around the year, cheap because you have no employees and thus no salaries to pay.
Consider expanding out from your first warehouse as a franchise.
> buy fake accounts & hire group of third-country freelancers with Good English to do your marketing
I can't really argue with most of the rest, however I can't help but laugh (and cry?) that the hustle obviously has to contain blatantly immoral tactics.
I realized today that "hustling" is actually very irrational for normal person not only due to prospect theory but ALSO due to the fact that you are not investing in a business with known revenue. For example, having proven that the belt system can work, a VC can probably guess whether this would bring in money. On other hand normal humans "hustle" based on illusion that A brings money because it has "successful" history IN OTHERS' BUSINESSES (probably still high failure rate of course, but say they accounted for that), but they actually should hustle only if they know their A has brought money. This has, with the manipulation of humans to make them "hustle", lead to increased consumption of business "investments" EG SEO-tools, designers, and whatnot—side consumption instead of side hustling.
Maybe you like gardening but also want to vacation during the summer. The overhead of having to water every day can be a chain for doing other things you love.
This checks out with someone I know who grows their own plants, and me, who doesn't spend time growing plants. We're both not interested in the product.
Maybe it has a niche. Millionaires who want to go on holiday but still like to grow plants. It seems more like a gimmick.
I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spending time outside, working with their hands, being involved with the food they eat and saving a bit of money. Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
On an industrial scale this thing is of course totally useless.