The Farm Hack River of Activity

I just came across this article that uses range finders (which are fairly cheap) to triangulate and give crop height measurements. I will see if I can get the whole text - here is a link to the abstract.

I am certainly a supporter of keeping the hardware costs of any of this kind of measurement to a minimum, and then do more processing on the backend (which is more easily shared).

I believe LiDAR would be used in this context to generate a topological map. It would be interesting to convert the 3D displays in topological maps and see how they match LiDAR.

LiDAR is kind of expensive - last time I checked the most affordable ones were about $800 but those didn't have a huge range... In the practice of topology mapping I believe they fly over with LiDAR so I would guess you need a decent range.

Just ran across an update from the Farm 2 Plate initiative in VT and thought it might be interesting to those pushing this forward. They mentioned that LiDAR data has been used to aid in food system planning/implementation efforts in the Mississquoi watershed. I'm no expert on LiDAR but I wonder if the ways they use use LiDAR might be helpful for what Dorn is trying to accomplish. They do mention that the data is useful for "biomass".

"This data will be extremely useful to a wide variety of applications from identifying agriculture soils that are available for production, flood plain mapping, renewable energy siting, Forestry, Biomass, & Vegetation Management.Existing LiDAR coverage has been completed within the Mississquoi watershed, Essex County and a few small regional efforts; statewide coverage will greatly enhance our food system planning and implementation efforts. This is a high priority strategy within the F2P Plan and connects to Goals 5, 6, and 7."

Check out "Team LiDAR"

Dorn - Chris posted a bit more and I was speculating about how we might calculate biomass from the hi-res Meshlab data. I thought you might have some input:

http://publiclaboratory.org/notes/cfastie/5-31-2012/3d-model-meshlab

Also, I was wondering if you'd done any ground-based biomass measurements, or how they might be done (barring, i suppose, cutting down all your veg and weighing it... :-P )

Almost everyone has removed their images -- Sorry, can you move them back into the folder so I can copy to the PLOTS server? i was gone this weekend and didn't get a chance. If you want a copy please copy them out, leaving the folder in there for everyone else. Dropbox can be kind of a weird system i guess.

but otherwise, the folder is at:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0eaer53x07kgi0w/v9p3xnI-GV

and I believe I can invite you if you like, so you get it via your desktop interface instead of via the website.

That's good to know. I think something is weird with the texture jpeg. I will run the Hypr3D process again. The Hypr server took more than 5 hours to complete the processing the first time. Before I submit it again I might sort through the photos and maybe lighten or darken some so they match better. I should put the images at Dropbox now that there is more room there. I will let everyone know when they are there.

Dorn, did you get my latest model to display in Meshlab? I tried it for the first time, and the gray model displays but I can't figure out how to make it display the texture map.

I selected 149 of the photos from the regular camera on the dual IR/visible rig balloon flights over Dorn's study plots and submitted them to Hypr3D. It used only 49 of the photos and the model covered fewer than half of the study plots. So I borrowed 40 of the photos from Jeff's higher elevation flight and added them for a total of 189 photos. I downsampled all the photos to 1200 pixels across first. The resulting model used 150 photos and covered an area similar to that of Dorn's first model. The texture mapped over the 3D model seems to include some high and some low resolution images. The modeled topography definitely reflects the relief of the mown paths, and the house and yard trees look pretty cool.

Is it time to try this in 123D Catch?

Thank you all for such a fun day. I hope we can all get together again in the near future. With all the imaging that took place, I am really excited to see what kind of mapping and analysis can come out of it.

I just created a "sandbox" wiki for us to use http://www.farmhack.net/tools/covercrop-remote-sensing-imaging

I am downloading the single camera images tonight and will get them sorted for sending of for 3d imaging.

We went over to the second site at the woodman farm research station down the road, but the wind was not blowing enough to get a kite up, so that might be a project for another day. I think I may have to get my own rig set up...Perhaps a basic farm hack tool entry could be the basic balloon/kite camera setup from open labs?

Good catch. Just added this to my list -> http://www.farmhack.net/node/191/revisions/view/561/582

We've built a couple multipurpose pedal powered machines and v-belts are an incredibly easy and universal way of pulling power off. Here's a video of one of our machines: www.pedal-power.com

For full disclosure, I am the co-owner of the company and we are planning on posting the plans for this machine to the farmhack site (soon!)