Farmbot and Openhab

Continuing the discussion from Thank you all!:

Kees_van_Gelder15h

That is great. I didn’t know that was possible. Only thing I am currently interested in is ho straightforward it is.I do know they have a public server and I know you can install your own server, but does that have its own MQTT broker? or can it be tailored to subscribe to the OpenHab MQTT broker?
I don’t have a Farmbot, but am considering it, would be nice to know what is possible

@Kees_van_Gelder:
I am currently exploring the whole story but it looks very promising. Straightforward in terms of easy to set up or good to manage once you know how to do it?

They do have a public MQTT server which I am currently using. I am planning on having my own one hosted in future, but for now it´s easier… You can just subcribe to topics, publish requests to trigger sequences etc…

Farmbot is still between alpha and beta version, so do not expect tooo much. Its rather a giant green space for all sorts of great ideas and connection between digital and real world. I love to test out all of my ideas.

Currently I am trying to have a primitive, condition based watering in measuring soil moisture and deciding on the weather forecast for this and the next day. Even that is great and intelligent stuff as hell :wink:

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Thanks for the info. as I get older I am looking for more and more ‘assistance’ in gardening, hence my interest in FarmBot. A public MQTT server is already a step up.
Understandably, I like to keep things under control myself and not depend on a ‘cloud’ somewhere that may go offline temporarily or permanent.

From the sleek promotion video of farmbot I had the imprssion they were pretty developed already, or at least more than what you describe: Using rainprediction to automatically decide on irrigation is something I am already doing in my very basic garden setup.
Nevertheless FarmBot is a very interesting concept and definitely worth following. I presume if necessary one can completely write ones own software for it

This is what I condemn as well. There are several threads in the FB forum about this “strategy”. At the end they are only annoying their very helpful litte community with those videos. Nothing of it works automatically, its rather alpha state. The support is more or less 0 or lets say 0.2 :wink:

I guess as well because of the no-support this is what some people did, right…

Very useful info Klimbim, thanks. They went down a bit on my priority list

Hey you,
interesting thread :slight_smile:
I’m running OH since 2 years now and I consider to build a farmbot 1.4 this year.
@Klimbim: You are saying it is still alpha state and support is close to zero. What is your status of the farmbot project? Have you succeeded in the end? still building it up? Do you think a technical guy and software developer with some amateur hand craft skills can get it running in some months?
Thanks
Markus

Hey markus,

the only thing I could really automate until now is the watering. The seeding is done so much much faster with the bot only travelling to the coordinates and me making holes in the ground to later on seed “manually” that I do not use the “seeding function”.

The moisture measurement is in my point of view completely useless. I did some measurements and due to the soil sensor being stuck into the earth with different depths and so the values are useless. Maybe it got better in the new version because they use golden pogo pins instead of head screw contacs :laughing: but I guess the problem stays a bit the same. I went over by using a capacitive moisture sensor and reading out through a nodeMCU, works like a charm, at least for the last season.

You can get it definitely running, the only question is what would you really need to do with it? I could compare it to a cheap china 3D printer: the main job is to understand it and try out different stuff, so the way is the goal. This is farmbot at the moment to me. A great playing field of all sorts of stuff, which is really cool. But if you assume to get vegetables grown and much of it automated, this is definitely the wrong device…

Hope I could help you a bit, don’t hesitate to ask or contact me :wink:

Cheeerio!

Thank you for your kind reply.
I have mounten my farmbot genesis 1.4 meanwhile, but I have a lot of troubles with my motors…

My z-axis motor produces a very loud sound due to vibrations… if I cannot reduce this significantely I cannot operate it really, my neighbors would get angry. I already mounted a damper between the motor and the plate, but this dosent help much.

My x-axis and y-axis motors are running if I do a calibration, but if it is about small movements, especially movements in x- and y-direction at the same time, they often stop erratically and end in an emergency stop.

No real idea at the moment how to fix this… if you have any hints, tips or tricks, please let me know.

BR
Markus