Gauging interest for a turnkey reservoir controller with nutrient/ph dosing tubes, IOT sensors, etc

Not afraid someone might steal this idea because it would require significant effort to reproduce the man hours, knowledge base, makerspace hardware hacking, and software development IP we have accrued to make this as turnkey and effective a solution as possible.
The reservoir controller is for ag sprayers indoors (see [1]) or on farms
The value add for you would be:

  1. Decrease maintenance and support time for your farm/indoor hydroponics grow by outsourcing software and hardware maintenance. On site installation would be a liability in the current climate, but we would provide video support for installation of the shipped product into your grow. Sensors come shipped connected to a box containing an Arduino + Wifi or Ethernet interface, on a rover for a farm and available with an off the shelf diaphragm pump for the reservoir.

  2. Increase monitoring of important metrics
    With enough setup, we could even install a spectrometer or analyze pictures of Hanna soil test kits.

Configurable sensors:
PH electrode
EC sensor
Ambient light sensor
Spectrometer (details on request)
Water pressure sensor for Vertical Farms and ag sprayers
Air pressure sensor for air atomized nozzles in ag sprayers
Low power soil moisture, humidity, and temp sensors for outdoor farms
Differential Drive rover attached to sensors with configurable industrial arm for remote operation (Universal Robotics, UFACTORY, etc.) for outdoor farms

  1. Lab sample and Seed to Sale tagging integrations
    Let us connect to your setup, automating your process to optimize growth, increasing yield and decreasing time to harvest while also reducing the expenses you incur to stay in compliance.

Would you buy in?

[1] These Plants Don’t Need Dirt, Just an Atomizing Spray Nozzle

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So a rover with a quadpump?

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Yeah but with a focus on the sensors for optimizing plant growth as well. The rover is for sensors that would be costly to effectively install and maintain at each individual section of medium. That was something we were thinking as an additional integration as we see rovers wtih waypoints getting set up in some of the smart farm and surveying solutions that have practically been implemented.

Aren’t there several dozen companies offering these systems, including well established ones like Hanna. Also, it’s really not a particularly challenging project for any machine integrator. It took us about 2-1/2 weeks to build ours in TIA portal on Siemens hardware. Mostly Honeywell sensors

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@SidViscous probably, for the systems part. We’ve done our research on the market though, so we definitely think there is some capability for onsite monitoring and automated dosing in precision with sensors in a feedback loop that is specialized for cannabis. Whether that market is saturated or not, would be interesting to find out. If it’s high tech, it’s probably expensive to implement and maintain. Imagine replacing a machine integrator and his team with your local mr. fix it who can just plug things in, the hardware is pretty inexpensive as it is.

@SidViscous Also, Siemens TIA portal must be pretty expensive to license, right? Imagine replacing that with our AWS microservices.

Arudio

Lazy ass growers!

Hands on is the best option for boutique flowers.

Dont get me wrong, I love the idea of hands free. BUT you need daily checks on your grow and hanf on vs some shit ass computer model to tell me what’s what.

10+yrs grower here. 100% hands on 7 days a week, 365 a yr. And I make BANK!.

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So that’s where the monitoring aspect kicks in! There is an infrared spectrum that also indicates what or how your plant is feeling on any given day. Also, imagine having a camera on your plants that you can fast forward and rewind with high speed time lapse, all automated in a grow journal with appropriate dosing for each nutrient channel similar to an aquarium.

Yes but it’s so much better when your daily checks are more equipment checks than plant checks. It’s also much easier to see when something is wrong with one plant if everything else acts very consistently.

I’m all for saving 2hrs daily. I run between 6 and 9 strains in my flower room of 18 plants. 2 of those strains do not keep up with the others. So I need to personally adjust their waterings.

Money isnt an issue with me anymore.

My room is dialed I better than a GM factory banging out cars. 100%

Sealed room
Ac
Deheuy
Co2
900.00 environmental controller

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Hydro X by trolmaster coupled with a hammer pump system.

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$269.10
is an interesting price tag for a hardware controller. This we could do similarly but without any sort of proprietary interface and with Wifi-synced online dashboards and we could include an HD camera for this price!

I will be PMing you tonight with details of our POC to see if mailing you a prototype for testing could work

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You are thinking of NDVI, which isn’t exactly Infrared.

Normalized difference vegetation index

I can tell you first hand, you can get useful data from NDVI, however it takes enormous effort to baseline for an area to extract any actionable information. Thankfully the processing technique is extremely simple and cheap! Take a sensor, rip off the IR filter, replace with a red or blue filter, measure the delta between channels and display as a heat-map.

Happy to lend some advice within the bounds of my contractual agreements to not develop the tech further. (I brought an NDVI device to market in 2016 and was acquired. The company dropped the ball and didn’t continue on.)

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Monitors humidity/controls dehumidifier, monitors/controls lights, CO2, controls HVAC and even has a smoke alarm. This is all coupled with an app on your phone. A $25 Amazon PTZ cam gives you eyes/ears in the room 24/7.

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Damn thats sweet. I know the Israelis are using this tech mounted on drones.

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My buddies use a cell phone (with night vision) to peak at their girls while lights off. All bluetooth

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Yes! this is actually what I was referring to. Currently I baseline in a Jupyter Notebook using Ray reinforcement learning for training. Since ripping the IR filter off was part of the process I was sadly misinformed that it’s in the IR spectrum. I could really use some help in just general statistics or sample data collection for the heat maps.

Also, would be interested in leaf spectroscopy.

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$25 on Amazon PTZ with mic.

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It is cool tech that I just started to scratch the surface on. Like I said, it takes a lot of effort to baseline and obtain actionable information from, but it is possible!

Sad part is it never really made it to a wider market.

It is actually the reason I refuse to outsource my manufacturing or bring on majority investors. It is preventing us from scaling as fast as we could otherwise, but damn it sucks to design a product and then have it shuttered after getting that good ol stock price bump from the press release.

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