farmee Closed Alpha v0.2 Released
Dear fellow urban, vertical or indoor farmers,
we’re proud to announce the release of our closed alpha v0.2 — the first version of our software platform truly living in the cloud, as well as a brand new version of our raspberry pi controller code. And best of all? The controller code is open sourced under the GNU General Public License. Did we mention we’re always up for collaboration?
For those of you who never heard of farmee: farmee is the first truly open software platform for vertical or indoor farming. You can use it to monitor and control your smart farm, both on-premise as well as remotely. It can talk to sensors and control your actuators.
Request early access
We’ve decided to release this version as a closed alpha first — an open beta will be following a little later. We’re looking for really close collaboration with our first users, to learn as much as we can along the way, so we’ll restrict access to 10 farmers at first and then slowly open it up for more people.
To request early access for the closed alpha please visit this website, fill out the form and join our facebook group Vertical Farming Future Lab. Alternatively, please send a request to hello@farmee.io.
Raspberry Pi Controller
You might remember the architecture scheme from my recent blog post about FDEX (Farming Data EXchange Standard). As stated above, a Raspberry Pi is used as “some kind of computer” for this version. We’re calling this unit Controller and it is the direct connection to all your components. This controller could be any other kind of computer later, e.g. PLCs or other microcomputers. We’re currently also working on an Arduino-specific version of the controller code, which will also be open-sourced upon release.
Cloud application
This is where the magic happens. You can log into our cloud application via any browser and directly monitor and control your farm. You might even ditch your laptop and go all mobile with your smartphone. Liberating!
Easier installation
We’re always trying hard to make installation as simple as possible. Just download the package to your Raspberry Pi, unzip it and you will find a file called INSTALL.MD which explains the installation in five easy steps. Hey, even I was able to install it on my first try and I’m responsible for marketing!
API key
The cloud application and the raspberry are living on two separate computers. They communicate through our API. To link both computers to your account you need your own API key. It is a sequence of numbers clearly identifying you as a user for both systems, the cloud as well as the controller. You can find it in your account settings after creating an account.
UUID — Unique User ID
Every user can have a number of units (=controllers) linked to one account. You could, for example, link two Raspberry Pi’s to your cloud application, one capturing sensor data, the other controlling actuators. Or you’re trying to control two separate grow racks, just like we do in our office. You can choose the UUID (or several UUIDs) as you please.
All new Dashboard
We’re introducing an all new dashboard. No graphs? No graphs! You can see at first glance if everything is fine or if things go horribly wrong. Using a much simpler system showing color coded values, you can define custom upper and lower limits to define what “out of bounds” means for you and your crops.
But of course, you can still have your graphs and curves in the Analytics-section for deeper insights. Timers offers all your controls via triggers and Intervals, and this is a view into our configuration-section. Please note the LOWER and UPPER THRESHOLD fields, resulting in red displayed values in the Dashboard. Simple, yet efficient in daily use!
Which sensors and actuators are supported?
We’re currently working hard on different hardware partnerships, so we can hopefully support a lot more sensors and actuators in the near future. For the moment, the following components are supported:
Sensors list
- DHT22 — Temperature and Humidity.
- TSL2561 — Lux Sensor (I2C Bus)
- AtlasPH — Atlas Scientific PH Sensor (I2C Bus)
- AtlasEC — Atlas Scientific EC Sensor (I2C Bus)
- YoctoCO2 — Yoctopuce CO2 Sensor
- WaterlevelSimple — A simple Input for monitoring a waterlevel (GPIO)
Actuators
You can connect simple relay boards to your raspberry pi and connect them to the GPIO ports. Using this simple technique you can switch on or off any type of actuator, no matter if 5V, 12V or 230V. But please be aware that working with electricity always carries risks, so if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, you better don’t do it.
We’ve also added support for the Yoctopuce MaxiPowerRelais, which is a lot simpler to setup and doesn’t require soldering. We can definitely recommend Yoctopuce’s products.
This gives you control over lights, water pumps, dosage pumps for PH down, nutrient feeders or fans.
What if my beloved sensor is not supported?
You could go for it and write your own sensor definitions, which is a lot simpler than you might think. Our code for the farmee controller (running on Raspberry Pi) is open source. If you are interested in contributing new sensors or actuators or other improvements, please feel free to fork our repository or contact us to directly contribute to the main repository. Please get in touch with any questions via the email below!
Or, if you don’t know how to do that, you can give us a shout and we can try to incorporate drivers for specific components. Just drop us a line at hello@farmee.io
Hey, ho, let’s get shit growing!
