Arduino For Small Farms

Project Overview

ONE24-466
Project Type: Partnership
Funds awarded in 2024: $28,870.00
Projected End Date: 02/28/2027
Grant Recipient: Woodmetalcanvas
Region: Northeast
State: Massachusetts
Project Leader:
Jan Yoder
Email
Woodmetalcanvas

Commodities

Not commodity specific

Practices

  • Crop Production: food processing, food product quality/safety, greenhouses, high tunnels or hoop houses, postharvest treatment, season extension, winter storage
  • Education and Training: technical assistance, workshop
  • Energy: energy conservation/efficiency, energy use

    Proposal abstract:

    Small farms, because of their variety, have bespoke problems. Microcontrollers like Arduino were developed as an open-source tool for prototyping and solving bespoke technology problems.  This project explores the use of microcontrollers in control, automation, and monitoring on small farms in 2 phases. 

    Phase 1 (research) uses microcomputers to prototype specific solutions to difficult problems for the 3 participating farms. 

    The 3 projects are: 1. Grain drying; 2. Blueberry sorting; and 3. Moving reemay over crops in greenhouses

    These are real problems local farms requested help with. 

    The designs that come out of these three collaborations will be documented and shared on the Farmhack website as open source plans with open source plans and code free to everyone.

    Phase 2 (education) is a series of 3 workshops for farmers, each of which teaches the basics and limitations of microcontrollers to the attendees, and equips each attendee with a “tool kit” of software and hardware for completing their own microcontroller projects at the workshop and on the farm.  Projects completed at the workshops will be documented on the Farmhack website as open source plans with open source code free to everyone.

    Project objectives from proposal:

    The objectives of the two phases of this proposal are the following:

    Phase I:

    Design, prototype, test, and document the following products with the participating farms:

    1. Automatic differential humidistat for grain drying  
    2. Automatic small scale blueberry sorter 
    3. Automatic greenhouse reemay mover

    Phase II:

    Advertise, prepare, and conduct 3 workshops for farmers in which attendees learn the skills and acquire the tools to build microcontroller projects for working farms. Participating farmers can use the workshop to build themselves a specific device of their choosing or use the workshop to build a sample device.

    Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. Government determination or policy.