Working on the electronics on my build now, tomorrow is going to be a lot of soldering and crimping for the wiring, but the holes are drilled and power is done.

Still a long time out, but received the first few parts today! Incredibly excited to get this tool head built. Just a few more months before it really turns into something.

I've decided to build a bot of my own, and I have been combing through the online documentation, figuring out how to source all the materials. Cost is definitely a factor though, so I have decided to do essentially a GenesisXL Frame running an expresses 3 in 1, also dropping the Encoders in favor of stall detection, and the cable chains in favor of a pole and some springs. Add in some 3D printing, and Im expecting a total (running) cost of $650-$700.

I have ran into just two things I'm struggling to find information on.

1st, I was disappointed to see assembled tool heads aren't sold on their own, for their listed $20 anyways. Also documentation seems to be a little scarce for the toolhead, especially when it comes to preassembley. I will be printing it, and through cad I was able to determine it requires (3 m5 brass inserts) and (1 m10 inserts),( 2 m5 to 6mm hose adapters), and a (5mm to luer lock adapter). How ever the spiral nozzles specifics are missing, or hard to find. I was however able to find (1/4" BSP spiral nozzles) and an (m10 to 1/4" BSP adapter), which will be sufficient. However, I was hoping to find some clarification on how its mounted on an OEM machine.

2nd, while I understand FarmBot recommends its own boards, the Genesis board is extremely cost prohibitive, and while the express board is a better option I have a pi4 laying around and again cost is a factor, therefore I have settled on an (mks gen l 2.1) with tmc2130. The configurations and support from farmbot for the Ramps 1.4 will make this easy, where my question comes here is if with the ramps firmware if I will be able to use spi stall detection. While the board supports it I'd like confirmation the firmware for ramps will. I really would like to stay away from endstops.

Thanks for the work you guys do Farmbot, excellent work on the documentation, it's extremely comprehensive. Thank you for being open sourced and easily modified. Thank you for your dedication in your project, it shows. And thank you for allowing your web service, to be used openly, a paywall would've been all too easy. When I finish in a couple months, I will be posting photos everywhere I can think of, and just being real loud about it in general.

Hi there. I'm a software developer who has had a keen interest in soil-less, water-conserving gardening for a while now, given the environmental condition of california. I've also been following farmbot's progress for a bit now and would honestly love to play with it. In particular, I have a plywood-size, rectangular lava rock media bed for one of my aquaponics set up that I've been considering as a candidate for a farmbot.

Obviously some of the functionality may not work as intended, but has anyone attempted something along these lines? I'm just curious about the reality vs the theory. I mostly like the idea of monitoring and disease detection.

So for those who dont know I originally made this plant dictionary/list and wanted to share to the world cause idk Im kinda proud of it and I think it could be helpful😀 Anyways Ive updated it from feedback and suggestions I received from Reddit like adding filters(more coming), better search and an auto scroll. Hope you guys like it and if there's any other feedback lemme know! Cheers🥰

-https://perenual.com/plant-species-database-search-finder

I’ve been long time eyeing a farmbot, and saw the XL one drop more than 25%! ($1500 down from $2100)

I contacted the support and they said they’d be running the sale until April 15th.

I’ve never made a raised bed before so I’ve been reading the docs and seriously considering pulling this trigger! Any pro tips would be appreciated!

Let's look back at some memorable moments and interesting insights from last year.

Your top 8 posts:

• "Is Farmbot worth it?" by u/Ok-Top-7808
• "Summer Internship in Spain: Lead a small team building a farm.bot XL" by u/mwpicard
• "[Hiring] Full-stack software developer at FarmBot (Rails, React, Typescript)" by u/rickcarlino
• "Re: Farmbot Express XL not connecting to Wi-Fi network" by u/Spunky25
• "Fruit farmers' most difficult task is organizing the havest. Tevel's drones select, pick and box only ripe fruits with the help of an AI working day and night" by u/peteschirmer
• "Solix Sprayer agricultural robot autonomously seeks and destroys weeds" by u/peteschirmer
• "Farmbot Express XL not connecting to Wifi network" by u/Spunky25
• "Happy Cakeday, r/farmbot! Today you're 8" by u/AutoModerator

​

Accommodation, food and great fun/learning provided this summer building a farm.bot XL. Our young engineer above needs a team leader. You need maker experience, arduino etc experience and a desire to enjoy the outdoors and work with others on a cool project. We are alellagreentech.com.

Hello Reddit, I recently finished assembling my Farmbot express xl, and now I am going through the setup process. I have successfully connected the Farmbot to our home Wi-Fi network through the prompt when I connect to the Farmbot Wi-Fi. Now the only problem is that when I go into the my.farm.bot page and it shows me the connectivity chart, the connectivity chart has green arrows from my phone to the web app and my phone to the message broker. There are red arrows from the web app to the farmbot and the message broker to the farm bot. There is a gray line from the raspberry pi to the farmduino. On my.farm.bot the debug information on the page says the the Wi-Fi might not reach the farm bot in the garden (ours is on the porch) but any Wi-Fi enabled device we bring near the Farmbot (phone, laptop, ext.) can connect to the Wi-Fi with very high speeds (200+ mbs) so the farmbot should be able to connect. Also the blue connect light just keeps blinking, which doesn’t make any sense. (I will also post an image of the problems I am describing) I would really appreciate your help reddit, and thanks in advance.

I’ve been fascinated with Farmbot for years. I love vegetable gardens but hate weeding. I have a 1700 square foot garden and have contemplated purchasing the genesis xl for years now. I’m nervous because the YouTube videos I watch show that the Farmbot doesn’t always function correctly. Does anyone have any real-time experience? I really want to know the truth if they work and how well they work before dropping $3,000 on an experiment. Any guidance,Videos, Research, Anyone here can share? Also how much ground does the genesis lx cover?

Let's look back at some memorable moments and interesting insights from last year.

Your top 10 posts:

• "After 4 years of being in a box I finally am able to set it up. Who’s running solar and what kind of set up do you guys recommend? 1.2 addition." by u/Justliketoeatfood
• "Does it live up to it's advertisement?" by u/SneekyF
• "FarmBot Gone Polar!" by u/Jack_Hogarth
• "Express and Genesis Difference" by u/FarmBot_Guru
• "Happy Cakeday, r/farmbot! Today you're 7" by u/AutoModerator
• "An alternate forum for farmbot also" by u/jaybestnz
• "Farm bot calibration" by u/immaculateconceptio
• "Farmbot CNC watering vs passing a soaker hose" by u/Bleizy
• "Farmbot raw instructions for non robot farming" by u/jaybestnz
• "Why some people dislike farmbot?" by u/cavalcaval

I have a strange request..

I am wanting to build out a decent sized garden (probably an XL size), but I cannot afford the Farmbot just yet.

I want to map out a full gardens worth of seeds, planting, watering and crop rotation for the year.

What I was wondering is if there is a version of the app which tells you to plant x seeds on x day, and then weed x on x day etc Eg the app sends you daily / weekly tasks to keep the garden going.

I'm sorry if this is a dumb question. I just discovered farmbot and it looks really cool. I don't know everything about it yet, but I'm just wondering though, what's the advantage of using a cnc above-ground watering solution vs simply passing a automated soaker hose with moisture detectors?

My guess is that people dislike what they cannot understand, as it hurts their ego of not being able to tinker properly with the bot or ?

Hello everyone,

I imagine this community has quite a few useful minds!

I'm a research associate at the University of Tasmania, and Graduated Mechatronic Engineer.

This year I have several 4th year electronics engineers, under my supervision - and FarmBot is one of the projects i will have them working on. We will be attempting to modify the FarmBot to work over a circular garden bed. This results in a much greater area using the same hardware and in fact less overall materials.

This project will involve converting the opensource code to operate in polar coordinates rather than cartesian.

Looking for initial advice from experienced users. Things we should be aware of and just general help. Of course the results will be made available to the public so hopefully everyone can benefit!

I'll keep this group updated if this post garners any interest

Thanks

Jack

I wanted to communicate that the FarmBot Express is a new product and FarmBot Inc. has not worked out all the kinks in this system just yet. I realize that the FarmBot Genesis system is more expensive but it has superior capabilities and reliability.

Please note that the FarmBot Express systems are limited in several important ways. This note details each of the aspects of the Express systems and how they are limited.

Here are the main points of comparison between the two models:

1.TRACKS: The Express model doesn't have X-Axis tracks. It just runs on the wood of the raised bed, which means that the end-user is responsible for ensuring that the garden bed is adequate to support the FarmBot. Additionally, the Express model has not been tested in areas with high winds. In contrast, the Genesis model has been tested in high wind conditions and has several years of operating data that show good reliability in many different growing environments plus a set of tracks that provide a very flat travel surface.

2. COMPUTING POWER: The Express model uses a Raspberry Pi Zero which is a lower cost, and ultra "cut-down" variant of the Raspberry Pi Model B. The Raspberry Pi Zero is slower than the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and it features a 1GHz single core processor and 512MB of RAM. This is in contrast to the Genesis, which uses the newer and more capable model of Raspberry Pi 3 B+ featuring a quad (4x) core processor operating at 1.4GHz . The Genesis has a faster computer with better overall capabilities, particularly for dealing with high numbers of garden points. The difference in computing power is significant and noticeable, especially when syncing data. The slower and less capable Raspberry Pi Zero makes the Express model potentially more susceptible to system freeze-ups and crashes.

3. EXPRESS WEEDING FUNCTIONALITY ISSUES - LIMITATIONS WITH EXPRESS FIRMWARE AND STALL DETECTION ON Z-AXIS MAKE WEEDING DIFFICULT OR IMPOSSIBLE WITH THE CURRENT HARDWARE: In the development of the firmware for the FarmBot Express we encountered difficulties gaining full functionality of the stall detection software. The limited stall detection capabilities make it difficult or impossible to achieve full functionality on the automated weeding process. The Z-Axis functionality has not been completed due to these firmware issues. Until these firmware issues are resolved, we can not guarantee the FarmBot Express systems will have the ability to do weeding.

4. NETWORK CONNECTIVITY: The FarmBot Express can only operate where there is a strong Wi-Fi signal. It can not operate where there is a weak Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi signal is weak, the Raspberry Pi Zero has no ethernet port for fallback.Another item to note is that if you are using Wi-Fi to connect the FarmBot to the internet, the Raspberry Pi Zero also uses 802.11n Wi-Fi protocol which may create a slower internet connection in comparison to the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ computer which supports the faster 802.11ac Dual Band 2.4GHz & 5GHz Wi-Fi protocol.

5. POSITIONING CAPABILITIES: The Express model doesn't have rotary encoders so it does not have the ability to independently determine the position of the Universal Tool Mount (UTM). If there is an error while an action is taking place it stops the sequence and it returns to home. You will need to re-start any sequence that has been started. For example, if you are doing a watering sequence and for some reason the FarmBot gets impeded by a plant, it will need to re-start the entire sequence because it doesn’t know the location of the UTM. This problem is avoided on the Genesis model because it is equipped with encoders that perform step counting.

6. COMPATIBILITY AND CUSTOMIZATION: The Express model does not have the capability to switch tools or to use the new tools that we are developing. The Express model only has the 3 in 1 tool head and it is permanently fixed to the tool mount. The FarmBot Genesis model has multiple tools and we will develop even more tools for the Genesis model. For example, we are currently developing a weed trimmer tool and an ultrasonic height measurement tool for measuring plants and to confirm the distance from the UTM to the soil. Upgrades to these tools will only be possible for Genesis models, which will see significant improvements in the future. There are other tools that are currently under development that will only be compatible with the Genesis system.

7. LARGER SIZE: The FarmBot Genesis models are larger and service a larger garden area. The FarmBot Genesis v1.5 (Regular Size) has a service area of 1.5m x 3m. Whereas the FarmBot Express v1.0 (Regular Size) has a service area of 1.1m x 2.7m. The Genesis model offers a proven track record of reliability in the field and it is a better long term value despite having a higher initial price. We are also developing new tools and enhanced features for the Genesis model that will make the FarmBot even easier to use. The FarmBot Genesis model will also come mostly (50%) pre-assembled and we expect that it will take between 20 and 30 hours of set-up time.

8. SETUP TIME: The FarmBot Express has one advantage over the Genesis model. It can be set up in approximately 1 to 4 hours. The FarmBot Genesis takes approximately 20 to 30 hours to set up. The set up time does not include the time to build your raised bed garden.

The full tech specs for comparison are located here: https://farm.bot/#tech-specs

I have had some serious issues calibrating this farm bot. the Z-axis never knows where it is. the amount of time I have put tinkering with the switches has to lead me to just set the setting back to default. I don't know how to accurately fix this issue and have the proper calibration of the axis. any help would be appreciated.

I'm thinking about getting a farmbot. I was wondering if it lives up to it's expectations?

I have experience with 3d printers and low cost cnc's using stepper motors in the past. My first printer would break more than it would print. However now I have one that just works.

I'm not looking for a "project" I just want it to work as it's supposed to, with minimal maintenance. Is this product for me?

Let's look back at some memorable moments and interesting insights from last year.

Your top 7 posts:

• "Open source" by u/RocketsledCanada
• "Active community" by u/honorabledonut
• "Express and Genesis dofference" by u/Chudsaviet
• "Is anyone just twiddling their fingers waiting for their order?"
• "Genesis v1.3 Firmware Error" by u/Hexagons-are-Cool
• "Automatic farm box" by u/refundel
• "POE RaspPi Farmbot" by u/joshuaherman

We have a genesis v1.3 farmbot, however, it was accidently updated to firmware v1.5, how do we revert it? I have tried to select v1.3 in the firmware menu, however this does not work, I have also tried selecting it and then pressing the flash firmware button, however this does not work. When v1.5 is selected a green tick is displayed in the firmware menu, however any other option displays a red cross. The system is also stuck in E-STOP, when I try to unlock the E-STOP it says " Failed to execute command: Firmware command: F09 Q69 failed to respond within 30 seconds". Does anyone have any way to help us?