brshute

I have been wondering about using 12v winches to move chicken tractors / henhouses. They can run off of a car battery and move things very slowly. A solar panel could recharge it easily. Once a week the farmer could move whatever the winch is attached to once the cable is mostly wound up (auger in the ground, heavy thing, or attach cable to another tree).

Great photos RJ! (btw you were at HEARTY Roots Farm not Healthy Roots)

To answer the questions:

What did you find most challenging about the build process?

I was worried the the actual soldering of the circuit board would be challenging, and that I would mess something up. It turned out to be no problem and was actually fun. I found it difficult to completely understand the nuances of the circuitry and why I was soldering what things where-- but as long as there are clear diagrams, the farmer can choose whether or not to pursue understanding the theory, but still end up with a working tool.

What do you think other farmers will find challenging about the build process?

For farmers who are totally unfamiliar with circuitboards, soldering, computer code, etc. there might need to be some links to basic tutorials that can be consulted before jumping into the project. Or just more thorough explanation of some of the steps in the how-to-- like, most farmers probably will not understand what the purpose of "Downloading Arduino IDE and libraries" is without further explanation.

Hi Grant-- Let me know when you have a graphic for the event and/or rsvp and/or schedule and I will put together a page at farmhack.net/iowa for the event and link to it from the front page. You can send it to farmhack@youngfarmers.org

Using the cell phone to program it sounds great. In thinking through the interface let's keep in mind that the basic text plan for the phone has 200 messages/ month so people will probably want to try to keep below their limit, although I'm sure some users will be fine with paying a little more to get more updates, etc.

Louis I like the idea of being able to program lots of variables with one text using commas. Maybe an added feature could be coming up with a little web interface to make this more intuitive-- farmer could plug in the variables into a form (fill in box for upper limit, lower, limit, check box for updates daily, hourly, etc) which would generate a text message to the Fido coded properly, using some kind of online SMS tool? I don't know enough about this to know if it would work, or how it could work, just an idea.

Or, the web form could just generate a series of numbers/characters for the farmer to then text to Fido, which Fido would understand-- just a way to make the inputting more user friendly.

It's exciting that the Tools section allows for collaborative development of new tools, but I think we limit the depth of our potential tool resource library if we set standards that are too strict for what is and isn't a tool page.

Those who have been actively contributing to the development of Farm Hack are no doubt jazzed on using this platform to comprehensively develop new tools by collaborating online- but not all farmer inventors are going to want to delve in so deeply!

Let's remember to make space for someone who sees an interesting tool on an old timer neighbor's farm and snaps a few cell phone photos of it and gets a good description from the neighbor about how it was made. Keeping our platform open to lower commitment levels of participation is more inviting to new members of the Farm Hack community (who may delve in more deeply later), and will mean more information, even if some of it isn't completely thorough, in our library.