Recorded from the floor of the 2014 South by Southwest conference, Frank welcomes three innovators in the arduino for agriculture space: Will Bratton, Luke Iseman, and Sam Bagot to discuss the nature and challenges of the Internet of Things as it applies to agriculture. Topics of discussion include what is arduino, why and how it is useful for sustainable agriculture, the failures of the open source community, competition from megacorporations like Verizon, fragmentation in the agduino space, and how to jump start a movement towards a standard, open platform for managing agricultural microcontrollers.
Relevant links:
Robot Gardener
Garduino
Horto Domi on Kickstarter
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6 responses to “Episode #136: Robot Gardener”
Saturating model farms (like Salatin’s) with diagnostic sensors is a great idea.
Can’t agree with your paranoia about Verizon. Once we have robust open source equipment, it will become ubiquitous among those who matter. We’re just not there yet. We don’t even have a robust cheap open source cell phone… or even simpler things like: camera, voice recorder, bike light, thermostat, watt minder, hot plate, battery charger, USB dongle… practically all hardware is still proprietary.
Billions of cell phones manufactured each year, billions of people ready for a $10 phone that isn’t a piece of crap, and not a single alternative yet. The people who know how to do it just aren’t doing it. Dumb phones from 2005 still sell for $50. But there will come a day when the creeping open source takeover of each human object will not be so painfully slow.
Wouldn’t necessarily say I’m paranoid, but trying to motivate the open source community to be unified and work together in developing a platform that can compete with the commercial closed-source companies. Fragmentation is often what creates sub-standard hobbyist projects. Lord knows we have enough of those. I’d like to see tools developed that can be deployed in production environments.
You’re asking for cohesion among a few dozen people at a very early stage. It’s good to go in all directions and feel out the possibility space when in new territory. Any corporate player will be unable to lock innovations under patent, and though they may make products that sell well, they will still be as limited and contradictory as all of our era’s business electronics — expensive black boxes that, at best, rely on dedicated experts for service. The open source folks will get to every feature eventually — every aspect of this engineering portfolio (mostly sensors) exists, just in clunkier form. Your example of WordPress — that has 10 years and probably well over 100k human labor hours into its development — perhaps more than a million hours. I’d be surprised if any single open source agricultural microcontrol platform has 1k hours into it.
Not necessarily perfect cohesion, but at the very least communication. Some of that I am providing here via this podcast and other channels of communication. The fact that the disparate groups haven’t really been talking isn’t a great thing. Consider that a lot of the systems that these platforms are being built around are being chosen now. These decisions will have impacts for many years to come, and yet these decisions are made somewhat haphazardly, based on the preferences of developers, not necessarily considering what functionality end-users may need when deploying in the field. So these conversations are more important now than they may be down the road. But the good news is that groups are starting to talk to each other, and this podcast is playing a role in that.
Not gonna argue with you there.
Wow Frank! Thank you very much for introducing me to the world of innovations like this.
I like tech as much as I like nature and gardening, and to imagine the possibilities of arduino in an establishment and operation of farm and homestead are just endless.
I look forward to your future updates. Keep up the good work!