Arduino For Small Farms

Commodities

Practices

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

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.

     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.