RoboGroMo

Yeah everything about this just makes it ever more clear that we need to escape the manipulation of the big tech companies because they'll all work together to establish their monopoly and milk us for every penny

Read this as Norwegian, was slightly confused.

Something that really can help learn how your plants are doing is timelapse video, I make an open source tool that makes it easy to do long durations using a raspberry pi and webcam but there are loads of ways to do it.

Apart from that just get to know the plants, they're so fascinating and when you know how they grow and what they're doing at each stage you'll notice problems do much easier

Everything is limited in what crops it can grow, if we can maximize the productivity of space in semi urban areas then we can use the other space for crops that best suit it - grains are great for distant rural farms because they store so well, same with potato, etc where you can fill a huge truck and drive into the city once every season but stuff like greens and herbs lose so much after only a few days from being picked so you either need expensive chilling or other processing or a small lorry taking a load every few days which really isn't a great way of doing anything

It can also be really good in areas where the climate isn't great for year round growing, with enough PV you'll still get enough to power the LEDs which you can put close above the plants and have on for 17 hours where as the natural sun might not be as bright or steady, also if you have like a wall unit inside then you don't need to worry about frost, slow growth due to cold or hot weather scorching. Having herbs growing inside really improves the quality of a room too, that fresh smell is nice.

Freshness is such a key thing, the difference is taste is so significant especially with herbs and greens so enabling people to have an easy to manage and small footprint little tower of good food in their garden, balcony, or similar would be really good especially for renters if it could be packed up for transport then resembled in the new location.

Yeah so much amazing potential, I've working on some ideas for a semi automated wall system, the idea is you have rows that are basically rails and you slide a pod in with seeds one side and take out the top one to harvest and reseed - the unit has a glass front so it's like a thin greenhouse, provides a little extra insulation and protection for the house as well as using the escaping heat in winter to keep the plants a little warmer, probably not ideal for a hot climate but somewhere like the UK it would be perfect.

It would be for things like leaf greens, maybe radish, short carrots, or other quick growing veg that would be good to have on a continuous cycle. I want it to have a single place to put water in and possibly a tap connection or tank so people can pretty much fill and forget - the glass should keep it safe from burgling little birdies that like to sneak into greenhouses and eat all the shoots, as well as other pests.

For the test ones I'm going to build I got some big bits of perspex used as COVID screens that shops were going to bin, well worth looking out for as such a waste otherwise. I made some clay from a hole I dug in my garden so would love to make a lot of it from earthenware, if I can get some good designs I'd love to make 3d printable molds. It's energy intensive firing ceramics but I saw some amazing solar concentrater kilns which would be great for a small collective or something making something similar.

Yeah I'd much rather be here watching it grow than on Reddit watching it die

i really think that it's going to be one of those things people look back on in history class and are just totally baffled by, like trying to explain the patent and copyright rules will just be a whole lesson of kids saying 'but that's so dumb...' and things like 'but why did they let one company ruin everything just to keep their mouse to themselves, were they stupid?'

I've tried moving away from Reddit several times with varying degrees of success, this time though it's felt really easy - the more i learn about Lemmy the more i like it and look forward to seeing it evolve. There are some really nice communities here too, feels like a lot of the most interesting people have come here but the spammers, bots and trolls haven't yet -- i'm sure it'll change as things grow but i'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.

i'm hoping that we see some development of smaller scale energy storage systems that help move away from generators, even something like a screw pump so it's rate can be varied to use excess power generation to lift water into a higher reservoir - it could them be used for irrigation without the need for other power and converted back into electricity as required in an emergency. Ideal for remote farmers as they'll require water storage anyway and can use the gravity fed irrigation system in normal use (using the same pump power or less used in a conventional system to raise water into the top tank) then have what's essentially free energy (in that it would have been wasted as excess previously) to add additional water for storage (from rain catchment systems or whatever is currently used) plus you even get a little bit of even freer energy if it rains.

It's such a safe, stable and otherwise useful energy storage method that i really think the potential energy in lifted water is such a promising area of development, there are so many pumping methods too - you can even use direct thermal energy to lift steam up into a condenser thus cleaning, sanitising and moving the water all in one.