As someone who went through endurance sports, being the fix-it guy, and a CS program I always sort of had one foot in both worlds and didn't really engage in this kind of rhetoric.

But as I've been accumulating more woodworking tools and getting a lot of dirt under my nails building a giant garden, I'm starting to see their point.

This device is going to gum up, being exposed to UV all day, dust, wind, and rain. The tolerances on this device are way tighter than any in situ environment is going to allow. And you're going to kneel on that track and it's gonna hurt like a motherfucker.

This will be like a pet turtle you have to keep flipping right side up, not like a roomba.

Having recently bought (and returned) the flagship Roomba, I struggle to see the difference between those two.

You say that like this device hasn't been around for years, accumulating revisions, upgrades, and user stories.

And you can’t make a robot only out of aluminum, steel, and ABS plastic. Cmon, you know better than that. All it takes is failure of one of the parts they conveniently did not mention and you have an expensive doorstop.

There are untold number of videos out there that complain about lack of sufficient grommets and conduits for vehicle trailers, resulting in predictable shorts circuits. You’d like to think these are all solved problems, but they aren’t staying solved.

For those of us who sling CRUD sites all day long, the opportunity to dig into more machine/computer interaction is just fun.

Observe: "Using the manual controls, you can move FarmBot and operate its tools and peripherals in real-time. Scare birds away while at work, take photos of your veggies, turn the lights on for a night time harvest, or simply impress your friends and neighbors with a quick demo."

Robot aside, the UI to plan your planting is pretty great though.

Drip hoses are also better from a water consumption point of view since it goes straight to the soil— you don't lose any to runoff or evaporation.

Here's some pictures[0] of people building larger scale ones:

- 10x20' inside a greenhouse

- 1.5x18m outdoor

[0] - https://forum.farmbot.org/t/photo-contest-post-your-best-far...

As a small hipster raised bed farmer (or rather, gardener), I actually looked into this at one point - the $1500 price tag put me off of it really quick. There's no way that kind of investment makes sense unless you're planning to sell the vegetables to recoup your investment - and it's doubtful that the machine will realistically last more than five years or so, so you'll have to replace it at some point in the fairly near future.

this seems like its definitely not a project yet for people who don’t enjoy that as a hobby.

hobbies are about tinkering and learning. we usually put far more in financially then we get returned financially. hobbies are expensive.

Nothing magical about it, there are some advantages to raised beds, but other than the ergonomics everything can be done in any other type of garden if you try.

On a different note, tilling also costs large amounts of energy. The less tilling your do, the less CO2 you are putting into the atmosphere (even if you do the tilling by hand with a shovel you are still emitting more CO2 than if you just sat in your easy-chair)

Does this still apply when talking about farming? I just started growing food this year, but once I've harvested the first crop and am planting the second crop of the season, the roots in the ground are surely going to break down quickly in any case, because I've harvested all of their tops, no?

>even if you do the tilling by hand with a shovel you are still emitting more CO2 than if you just sat in your easy-chair

I'm sorry, what? By that logic I should also never exercise.

I think many farmers have moved towards using various types of something called “cover crops” rather than tilling. These cover crops have different impacts depending on which are used: some have incredibly prolific rooting systems that dig deep and break up the soil on their own; some pull nutrients from deep in the soil and grow massive green above ground so farmers let these grow to pre-seed levels and then plow it over, and leave it so it decomposes and re-releases those same nutrients to the surface, and also draws all the micro biome critters in which then fertilize the soil even more; some plants fix nitrogen levels and some bloom various types of flowers which pull in pollinators. Some do a premise mix of multiple types of cover crops.

I think tilling is still done sometimes but it’s only for certain situations but is avoided most of the time these days.

I just got into gardening a few years ago, so I’m still learning most of this as I go along, but from what i’ve read, tilling is phased out except for certain situations.

I can say with absolute certainty that by my third year of working on soil, my gardens soil absolutely does not need tilling at all, it’s fluffy and soft for at least two feet down with plenty of life in there. But much of the surrounding area is pretty clay tough. Honestly it was super easy, just needed like a season of building the soil properly.

Another Ive noticed is, many of our home/hobby gardening techniques which our parents generation adopted were really only useful for enormous factory level farms and were actually not good for small or home gardens. These two situations need entirely different things but marketing and such over the years really steered that generation into doing a lot of the wrong things.

I don’t know your situation, tilling may be the best option for you, but it also may be to just dump a bunch of compost on top, let it settle, then plant some rooting cover crops and let it do it’s thing for a couple months. The latter may be much much healthier for your soil.

I was hoping you would notice the exercise connection. I don't have answers to that, just an interesting consideration.

In the case of clay, deep mulch will do wonders, and the earthworms will gently improve the soil over time.

Also, don't forget the weeds. Almost all of the plants humans label as weeds, have very deep sub-soil penetrating roots (most are also more nutritious than the stuff we've bred for us or other animals to eat). If you want to rebuild your soil, let the weeds grow and then either use them for compost which you'll later top-dress your soil with, or just chop them and leave them be for the cover crop effect, or work them in slightly, up to you.

This has been my primary approach. Letting the grass and "weeds" grow relatively tall then trimming them down every month or so, letting the clippings rest where they are more or less.

If you have a new house, developments are horible, just enough soil to grow grass. You might be stuck buying good compost and soil and tilling that in deep, then letting grass grow for a few years before trying anything more.

The word you’re looking for is “naturalized”. Not native, but they’re already there, so...

Also, try asking a coffee shop for leftover ground and sprinkle it around...

Also thanks for the recommendation of using coffee grounds. I have a couple local shops nearby I think would be willing to offload that on to me haha.

Raised bed, you know what you get.

iRobot founders' new thing. Small, and undercapitalized, but promising.

I think it might have been this one, Acorn by Twisted Fields:

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsyEIgKVM5E

I just published a new article to go with our latest video. This one takes a closer look at the vehicle subsystems.

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/a-closer-look-at-acorn...

Edit: just submitted it as an article on HN if anyone wants to give it their vote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27634450

I'm not sure what you mean, to me this sounds like "everybody knows that birds can't fly". But I might just be totally misunderstanding you.

Do you mean "there are no straight lines on farms near where I live"? Cause, well, half my relatives are farmers and their farms are very much made up of straight lines.

For context, here's a google image search for Dutch potato fields: https://www.google.com/search?q=aardappelveld&source=lnms&tb...

Large, flat, level areas aren't that common, while major-to-minor deviations from flat-and-level are very common. The grandparent comment is I believe rightly asking "how does this 'farm bot' solve the problems of real farms?" I agree, this looks less like a farm-bot and more like a "serious gardener bot", which is a different niche.

[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palouse_hills_northe...

https://www.toro.com/en/professional-contractor/compact-util...

Here’s a nice overview of a no-dig farm: https://youtu.be/u79tiVcj8bY

The simple AB line served the agricultural guidance industry (think GPS) for many years before systems capable of handling complex curves arrived on the market.

Also their approach is great if you have a metal shop and lots of raw materials and components ready to go, but for their goal of helping mechanized developing countries, I think it falls flat. The first rule of pricing hardware is economy of scale wins. Being able to fabricobble a farm tractor from a Toyota pickup is way more valuable than building one from scratch using steel box beams.

I think their approach would be better served by creating an "API standard" for mechanical interfaces, like an ISO standard of sorts, so you could fabricobble your prime mover, your bucket loader, your hydraulics, from whatever you happen to have, and be able to swap out with anyone else's peripheral. Like the IDDS, but more down to Earth :) :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Docking_System_S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spidercam

Where it can be suspended above the field and moved to any point above the plant and can be raised as crops grow?

"At home Grow food for yourself, your family, and your community by installing FarmBot on a raised bed, urban rooftop, or in a small greenhouse at home. Fully automated, hyper-local food production has never been so attainable."

This is the antithesis of commercial farming.