Startup Aims to Make Hydroponic Farming Accessible to Everyone. Sustainable Microfarms envisions a future in which anyone can maintain a hydroponic farm because growing produce won't require soil, lots of land or knowledge of the nutrients that their plants need to survive.
Hydroponic farms work by dipping plants in mineral-rich water in lieu of soil. Sustainable Microfarms has developed an individualized hydroponic-farming system called the Genesis Controller, which regulates the water's nutrients, temperature and acidity; this means growers don't need to be experts in the plants they're raising. Users can customize the type of minerals that a Genesis Controller can add and monitor, as well as the number of times per day that the system checks nutrient levels. With a machine this attentive, the idea is that farmers can just let plants grow. "It's hard to start large hydroponic farms," Sanjay Rajpoot, founder of Sustainable Microfarms, told Mashable. It also has the potential to reduce transportation costs of major produce providers.
Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard! Green Society Aquaponics. Bilal Bomani: Plant fuels that could power a jet. OpenEnergyMonitor. Automated Greenhouse - Fisher Innovation. AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits. Hardware hacking often seems like black magic to the uninitiated, which is why 123D Circuits is so cool: it allows you to learn electronics using a virtual Arduino board and breadboard without blowing up capacitors or burning yourself with solder on your work table.
Created by AutoDesk, 123D Circuits is part of the company’s “sandbox” initiative that offers simple 3D simulators, 3D printing apps, and other tools for beginners and advanced users to take part in the Maker movement. To be clear I have very little experience in breadboard design and I find Arduino baffling right now (I’m pretty good with my Raspberry Pi, though). However, as an entry-level system for creating circuits as well as electronics design collaboration this thing looks pretty good. You can even print your own PCBs using designs made in the app and it supports Arduino programming using a built-in code editor.
The service is free and upgraded accounts are available for $12 and $25 a month. Wireless open-source greenhouse monitoring: HarvestGeek. HarvestGeek is an open-source wireless greenhouse monitoring and automation system created by developer Michael Alt.
Originally designed for use in home mushroom cultivation and inspired by seeing the need for easily accessible fresh food in certain parts of the country where he grew up, Michael has expanded the system to be used in a wide range of applications (gardens, breweries, greenhouses, hydroponic system) and scales (From window gardens to multiple greenhouses with up to 26 sensors allowed per base station).HarvestGeek is the name of the cloud platform that manages your custom alert settings, set automation settings, and track your plants growing conditions over time. The Cloud platform gets its data from the HarvestBot base station, automation controls and sensors:BaseStation: Ethernet deiven device that plugs into an open port on your router. SMS controlled Wireless Irrigation System. UPDATE 02/13/11 : Voting has started for the Sparkfun Microcontroller Contest.
Please VOTE for me! UPDATE 02/26/11 : I won a second prize!! Huzzah! Thanks for all the votes guys! UPDATE 03/17/11: I would love to win a Laser cutter in the Epilog challenge as it would help the small DIY community in Calcutta, which just started a few months back to cut all their materials using a CNC instead of using their saws etc. Irrigating crops with the exactly right amount of water is a tedious task, especially when you have to walk a long distance to the irrigation pump in the middle of the night to check whether any problem (fish getting stuck in the intake and as a result the irrigation motor burning or jamming!) I started to think about a system, which would: 1. And thus came the brainstorm to build the "SMS controlled Wireless Irrigation System" . The prototype could do the following: Aquaponics commercial raft. Bob's Aquaponics. Aquaponics Design. Allan Savory: How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change.