Gargantuan Garden Bot - Day 5

     

Robotic Gardening Day 5

    For day 5, everyone was excited to continue working on the FarmBot after we moved it to the floor on Thursday. We started the day off with some maintenance work on the bot, adjusting the rails and the belt to make the gardening robot run better. The work got a little tedious but once we got the robot running smoothly it was all worth it. We only had a couple of crises today that we had to deal with, the main one being when the belt that moves the farm bot got completely messed up, which took a good chunk of the day to fix. At around 10:00, Mr. Beradino taught us how to make cables by sauntering and using heat shrink tools, and we applied these cool skills to make wires for the water sensor. We also had 3 students from the Art of Cooking M-Term, who were waiting for their pizza dough to finish so they passed the time by helping us manage the FarmBots various cables and switches.

Ben and Autumn making cables 


    After lunch, we set began programming the FarmBot to pick up and drop different tools, like a rotary, a soil sensor, and the seeder. This was a challenge as the FarmBot operating system can be finicky and adding a feature this complicated was no easy task. It took hours of trial and error, bu tby the end of the day we had the robot picking up and dropping various tools it needed to work as a gardner! 


The FarmBot tools ready to be used! 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 2

Image
  Today was the second day of our Robotic Gardening M-Term! We started the day by doing some research on the three things needed to sustain our robot in the garden: water, WiFi, and power. We learned that our water system needs to produce a minimum force of 25 PSI, which means that we will need a water pump in our rain barrel. For power, we are able to use the existing outlets in the garden area, which means we won’t have to run any additional wiring. However, the issue of wifi did not turn out to be as simple. We tested the wifi in the garden with our computers, and it worked great. However, when we went back inside and installed the operating system for our FarmBot, turned it on, and attempted to connect to wifi, nothing happened. We re-flashed the micro-SD with the operating system, and attempted to connect again, but it just wouldn’t work. After several hours, and a ton of help from our friends in IT, we figured out that the wifi security system that the school uses renders the...
Read more

Day 9 - The Real Deal!

 Alexander McGill      Today, we came into school optimistic and hopeful that today will be the day we finally finish the FarmBot. We started the day by cutting the pillars so that we could fit the robot onto the garden bed outside. After we prepped and were ready, we all picked up the robot and carried it outside, setting it on the garden bed!      Now that we have the robot outside, we began setting up the software so it could actually start farming on its own. Alexander and Max worked on setting up the hose system, and Aautmn and Ben worked on making sure the farm bed was level so it could function properly.      After a morning of hard work, the FarmBot was outside, and functioning properly! We couldn't believe it, but then suddenly, the connection ran out to the FarmBot network, and we couldn't consistently use it anymore. Mr. Beradino worked with Mr. Giannis to identify the issue, but it unfortunately meant that we couldn't work on...
Read more

Day 4 - Refinements

Image
     Today we received most of the things we ordered from Amazon and all of our things from The Home Depot, including the wood, water pump, and hundreds of pounds of garden soil. Most of our day was spent devising a way to measure the amount of water in the rain barrel, as we will not be using water from the tap. The water sensor (in the tank) will be connected to the Arduino computer in the FarmBot and give us readings on the computer. We tested using a water glass as the bot was still inside. After some trial and error, we eventually came up with a sequence that would take a sensor reading every five minutes. If the water level is less than a certain number (in this case, below 200), it sends a warning notification to the FarmBot app and email. This way we will know when to fill the rain barrel if it doesn't rain.       After figuring that out, we programmed two of the three custom buttons on the FarmBot, one to return to its home position, and anoth...
Read more