Hi Folks,
My name is Katrina and I am a student in Food Systems at the University of Vermont, and a long-time Greenhorns supporter. I am looking to form a team to present a hacked tool that will help "the global farming community." The winner of this prize will get $100,000 to manufacture these tools. The only catch is that half of the team (actually 51%) must be enrolled at an university. That's where I come in and another colleague in the Agroecology department. I'm looking for a good base idea and possibly even a prototype that can then be turned into a business plan and presented to the committee. Your name- your product. However, my goal is that this tool would remain open-source and truly benefit farmers not only in the U.S. but abroad as well. Let know if anyone has idea, suggestions, comments. Looking for excited collaborators. The application is due at the end of February. http://www.agprize.com/
Best, Katrina Light
Hi Katrina
My company, Apitronics, is an open-source platform for deploying wireless sensor and automation networks on farms. We are currently manufacturing our base unit, the Bee, a battery powered, solar rechargeable, wireless device, and our Weather Plug, which enables the Bee to become a weather station.
It's possible that we could come up with an application that we could collaborate on. Things we'd like to manufacture next are controllers for irrigation, greenhouse, aquaponic, what have you. We're designing our systems to communicate between nodes and to leverage the benefit of having everything networked. With a weather station AND a greenhouse controller, you could start coming up with some really interesting automation. Is it "too hot" but almost night fall and a cold night is coming up? A simple thermostat might release that heat, while a networked system could easily have the intelligence to capture that heat for the night.
Anyway, that's just an idea. We basically have a core of any wireless system and have designed everything to make it easy to prototype new ideas. So we could try out just about anything for this competition. We're already open-source and would have no problem maintaing that with you :)
--Louis
louis@apitronics.com