Although I am a Software Engineer / Entrepreneur, I have always loved the idea of farming and I enjoy growing vegetables in my home garden. About 7 years ago I read an article about vertical farming and my mind began to race with the possibilities. Suddenly I could see a future of growing enough food right in the urban areas where the food would be consumed. We could reduce the need to ship so much produce all over the world and just grow it directly where they will be sold. The idea of being able to set up the perfect environment or recipe for the crop you wanted to grow at the highest yield possible got me super interested in the potential vertical farming had on our future as the human populations continue to expand and changes in climate may have serious effects on conventional grown crops. Although I was interested and wanted to get involved and learn more, it felt so out of reach. I would need a greenhouse and resources outside of my reach to even begin to experiment with finding solutions to new problems. So I put it on the shelf in the back of my mind and went back to coding.
Until 2018 when I read about OpenAg and heard about it from a talk by Caleb Harper. Once I learned about the idea of a food computer, the future became accessible to me. I found myself spending weekends reading on ways I could build my own food computer lab to experiment with different approaches. So I began to asked some questions on the OpenAg forum and I got some direction from Peter Webb. I now had a blueprint I could work from. I took the BOM and the documentation on how to build an MVP and built from those ideas and added my own. Without that foundation the process would have taken me 10 times as long and I may have just scrapped it a some point. But with the MVP platform I had a roadmap to a working solution.
Fast forward to today and I am well on my way to finishing my own food computer. So I decided to start documenting the steps I took to build my own Food Computer.
Step 1: Just A Little Research
Before I dove into building my Food Computer I did a little research on hydroponics and the technologies currently being used. Thanks to Google and YouTube I quickly got a taste of the complexities of growing plants in a soilless environment. I also made a couple of trips to my local Hydroponics store and asked questions there. Soon I had a design concept sketch out.
One of the biggest differences from the OpenAg design is that I chose to use aeroponics instead of hydroponics, based on some advice I got from my local Hydroponics store. The other difference, is that I used 2 large plastic storage tote and PVC pipe I had from Home Depot as the body of my Food Computer. I also used a couple of different electronic components, which later turned out to be a challenge when I tried to install the software, but I’ll go into that later.
Step 2: Build the Aeroponic System
So I chose to go the Aeroponic route, which I solved by following the instructions from a great video from The Family Plot. It is basically a PVC manifold that sprays the roots that grow down to into the water reservoir. Here are the notes I took from watching their helpful video.
So I followed the steps to build out their aeroponic system explained by The Family Plot. I started out measuring and cutting the pieces to build the water manifold.
Before I pushed all the PVC pieces together, I disassembled them to drill the threaded holes for the spray nozzles, being sure to knock loose any plastic burs to prevent them from clogging up the nozzles in the future.
Once all the holes were drilled I pushed the pieces together so that it fit a couple inches below the rim of the tote. It did take me a couple of trimming cuts, but finally got a snug fit.
Next I screwed in the spray nozzles into the threaded PVC holes.
The 180 degree nozzles on the outside edge and the 360 degree nozzles in the middle.
The next step was actually a lot messier than I expected, so be prepared. I drilled the 12 holes into the tote lid for the net pots to fit into.
In order to maintain the system, the water will need to be changed out from time to time. So a hole at the bottom of the tote needs to be drilled with a grommet plug, 90 degree elbow and drain tube.
Below is a view of the drain hole and grommet from the inside of the plastic tote.
Now I had all the pieces to the aeroponic system, so I attached the water pump to the manifold and put it all together.
Here you can see the water spaying through the nozzles looking down through the PVC manifold. Watering system complete!
Step 3: Build the Plant Shelter
The plants need to be in a closed environment so we can control the temperature. I used a second plastic storage tote for the top, but used PVC pipe and foil insolation to create enough height to grow taller plants. It will provide a durable top surface and allow me to safely attach temperature sensor, lights, camera, 2 fans and the Raspberry Pi3 brain.
Since I chose to use a different temperature sensor than the one OpenAg was using, I needed to do some research on how to connect and configure it to the system. I found a couple of great resources that helped me to figure it out. This PDF was the most helpful, but I also got some information for this PDF as well.
