We are using FreeBSD in a Hydroponic Nutrient Control System. (pics)

zester

zester

Got sent to a prospective client's company in Seattle. I had no idea where I was going or whose company it was. I was there to make sure the working conditions would be suitable for our employees, since it's considered an industrial site with hazardous chemicals.

Needless to say, it turned out to be a famous rapper's cannabis business. He wanted to develop his own hydroponics control system for his grow operation, basically for bragging rights with his other famous rapper friends who also have cannabis businesses.The first pic is me sending a selfie to my boss with the message, "Are you kidding me!!!" She laughed at me and told me not to fuck it up and to make a good impression.The second picture is me high as a kite, being the good employee that I am. 😂 He wanted something nobody else had, and I was like, "Well, we could develop it on FreeBSD." He liked the daemon. 😂

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Well, you can make a freebsd central control hub, and then have a distributed network of raspberry-pi's with the sensors and actuators attached. Design a web gui that shows you the state of each control node, temperature, soil humidity, water flow rate, etc.; an embedded web server on each control node. You want to be able to monitor the entire network and change things like flow rates at each control node, from one desk, so you only need one guy (or maybe an AI agent) watching the whole thing. Perhaps also need to monitor things like soil ph, level of fertiliser, oh... and light level, you probably want to control the light flux falling on each area to optimise power consumption and growth rate. Then there is ventilation control, fans... it could be quite sophisticated. I wonder too if there is scope for roaming drones or wheeled robots to patrol the setup, perhaps to take measurements or for monitoring, or security. A possible alternative to rPi's is fanless industrial mini-pc's with usb-attached instruments. You could run freebsd on every node in the system, of course, including the pi's.

Once you've prototyped it in that setting, it might well have wide applicability in agriculture. It's really big business, I remember reading about these 'vertical farms' in china, very impressive, multi-storey hydro-farms, I expect the US is doing something similar. So use the rapper's dollars to develop a good solution, publish a couple of papers on it, then market it to the wider agribusiness market. I'm sure there are other firms in that space. It's a control system to solve an optimisation problem, with the goal of maximising production yield while minimising inputs like water, power, human labour and chems. Quality of the product must come into it too. I bet big tobacco and big greenhouse are looking at this kind of thing.

Ha... can you use AI to optimise the grow yield and running costs. Another thing to investigate. Could be a very interesting project.

Revolutionizing Agriculture: Hydroponic Growing Systems in China

Hydroponic growing systems are revolutionizing agriculture in China, offering innovative solutions to food production challenges. As urbanization and
www.sourcifychina.com www.sourcifychina.com
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fxjJMJrYMc
 
I just thought, there may be a space tie-in with this too. If Elon gets his stuff together, there will be a manned moon base up there soon, running off frozen water from crater bottoms, perhaps built in lava tubes or similar. A hydro production system that works in that environment could be worth a lot of money. Maybe you better choose rad-hard processors, just in case. :--)
 
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