The Farm Hack River of Activity

I can't wait to see this design process unfold. It would be great to host a google hangout on this topic so that we can get more people who are interested talking together about this.

Will you be joining us this weekend in Boston for the pedal power event?

Sorry I didn't see this question when it was first posted.

Machineries Agricole St-Césaire (http://www.machineriesagricoles.com), tel. 450-469-4081 These guys stock factory-built male quick hitches from Poettinger at about $450 Cdn each.

I bought three of these last year to convert our fleet and have been extremely happy with the quality and functionality of the male hitches. The locking mechanism is safe, secure and easy to use, I think these hitches will still be working fine when I kick the bucket and I'm 37.

The folks at St-Cesaire speak German, French and English. You'll likely want to talk to Urs Hoechli or Franck the parts guy. Both are excellent. Also stock hydraulic top links, both good quality Walterscheid for bigger tractors and cheaper Indian Cat II units for around $300 each.

Good Evening Johan,

I am happy to hear that this tool looks useful to you. The good news is that the "English" system of measurement is not really built in to the tool; some things include labels with "/ft," for example, but there is no conversion being done and you could just imagine that it says "/m" or "Row Meters." In other words, the units will not affect the calculations. You can use any units you like, as long as you do it consistently.

The same idea applies to the currency; the "$" symbol is built in to the spreadsheet, but you can use the tool as if that symbol stood for kronor.

As for the names of the crops, those are always entered by the user (you). If you sign up for the tool, you will receive a blank copy, and you can use any crop names you want. They don't even have to be any natural language; you could use a secret code if you wanted to.

All of that aside, if you try the tool and think you will use it, I can work with you to change the units and the currency in your copy. It will not change the function of the tool, but maybe it will make things easier for you and your team.

Best, Bill

Hi Stephen,

Currently being organized is an event in the UK in April. I don't know how much of the goings on will be relevant to Arduino but it would be a great place to tap into the FH community there in the UK. Ed Hamer of the Land Worker's Alliance is the main contact there. I'll intro you to him.

Relevant to arduino/raspberry pi on this side of the pond are Apitronics, Fido, and Open Pipe Kit.

Continue to be in touch with any questions you have and thanks for joining the conversation here!

Thanks for sharing your

We have .sldprt and .dxf files. We are unable to upload to 3D Warehouse because we are not using sketchup at this point, but we are able to upload to GrabCAD, which is free. Culticycle CAD files

Do you know of anyone who uses GrabCAD on FarmHack?

Let us know if the .dwg v. .dxf issues gets fixed for the FarmHack page.

On a slightly separate topic but getting at the same goal, I think the most important thing we can do to advocate good documentation is make it super easy and accessible to document on the Farm Hack site. The more advanced and tech-savvy documenters figure out work-arounds to embed pdfs, imgur albums, spreadsheets, hackpads, dozuki etc. But in an ideal platform, all of these functionalities might be made more native.

To test, I just tried to post a CAD drawing exported from sketchup. The current forum supports uploading .dwg files, but not .dxf for some reason. We should put a request to expand that. A sample .dwg file is included with this post...

Right now I think the reason folks are posting images of CAD files rather than the CAD files themselves is that the tool wikis do not make it easy to share files other than images. We could do some workarounds until something is coded by linking to other sites, or using forum posts to attach .dwg files.

The current workaround are the sketchup drawings posted to Farm Hack through 3D warehouse links (Here is one collection - https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/user.html?id=0892628611291470687637722 ) These can be exported to CAD files fairly easily. I would love to see some more discussion around how we would like to create, link to and archive 3D models within the Farm Hack community.

The Nanos are just a bridge and a wifi router "bubble" is needed for phones etc. to use the signal. RJ and Duggie recommend the TP-Link TL-WDR3500 wireless router to me. It is inexpensive, has a good range and can be modified... A ubiquity Pico or a nano aren't too expensive as an external antenna (say attached to a truck, gator or golfcart), but each device would need one.

Alternatively https://commotionwireless.net/ has firmware that can be loaded onto the ubiquity hardware to create a mesh network and to have the nanos act as a bridge and a wifi hotspot....

We will be expanding our wifi bubble this year, and hope others will try it out as well.

I set up a similar situation, but simply between home base and cabin - I used two Ubiquiti LocoM2 - pretty much the cheapest option, $50 each. I use them as a bridge, and I set up a $20 router in the cabin - works perfectly for me so far. Cabin and base are about 300 ft apart at least. I don't get a wifi signal on my phone right now, even though I have connectivity through my computer, I"m not sure why that is. One thing to think about is the farmwide wifi specifically for phones and what equipment may work the best for that scenario. Thanks for documenting your work!

Thanks!

Another question, I have yet to find any CAD files on FarmHack. There are a lot of .jpegs of CAD files. Do users have to contact the developer for access to CAD files?

FarmHack Folks -
My friend Isabel and I are embarking on a culticycle build this semester. We are hoping to have a prototype completed by mid May. We hope to be adding to existing documentation from Tim through using CAD. We are curious about FarmHack and starting to document progress here. We have been working mostly in Google Drive currently and will link that work shortly. For those of you following the culticycle documentation, would it be more helpful to add documentation to Tim's culticycle page or to create a related tool and create a culticycle page of our own?
We are looking forward to collaborating -
Emily