This is the 10th in the series of posts about my project, Blubot, a robot that takes care of your raised bed for you. With Blubot, I'm on a mission to make gardening easy, space efficient, and low cost, so anyone, anywhere can start a garden. Check out the first few posts and table of contents here.
Over the summer, I built a raised bed to a specification that would work with the robot. Check out post 9 for details about the planter box build. In this post, I'll focus on some of the challenges I encountered in installing the Farmbot and getting it running.
Connect to WIFI
An issue I encountered early on was the inability to connect to Farmbot via the Internet. It is a simple process, similar to how one would connect to a free WIFI network at a hotel. Since the Farmbot's standard of "strong" internet connection is far above what is average, it didn't even detect my home network as an option. As shown below in this reference screenshot, taken from Farmbot's website, the strength of the Wi-Fi is shown in the menu. For me, the strength of my Wi-Fi was yellow. I tried Wi-Fi extensions, soft resetting the Farmbot, to even reinstalling the OS multiple times to get it in its boot sequence, and yet after several tries, nothing worked.
Also, it's important to note for those of you planning to set up Farmbot with an office or school internet, make sure the network ports that Farmbot uses are available and open. In my experience, it was easier to use an ethernet cable to connect the Farmbot to the internet. It immediately connected with no issues whatsoever. I ran this ethernet cable from the router in my house through the walls to the backyard.
Belt Tensions
Since the Farmbot is built on its own, separate from the raised bed, it requires the belts on the gantry to have precise tension and be perfectly straight. I noticed that when I test ran Farmbot for the first time after installing the gantry belts, its x-axis stuttered greatly. This happens because on the older Farmbot models such as the Express v1.1, the axis stall detection on the software itself is very premature and sensitive. It is important to keep the belts with tension, but not too much to the point where the motors cannot handle the tension in the cables. As you can see in the images below, the belt that runs along the raised bed goes up into the gantry columns, runs along a gear that is powered by a motor, and runs down and out the other side of the column. If the tension is too much, the gear wouldn't be able to provide enough torque to turn and make the farmbot move. If the tension is too little, the belt would slip right over the gear and not move at all while the gear is moving.
I tried having medium tension with a large accelerate value in the Farmbot's software, but it was inconsistent. Sometimes it would stall, and other times it would traverse the whole raised bed perfectly fine. I tried a large amount of tension, however the Farmbot would stutter even greater than its default values, and not budge. After adjusting the tension by unscrewing the belt fasteners from the raised bed and screwing them back on with a little less tension and disabling the x-axis stall detection, the Farmbot was able to move consistently up and down the raised bed. This solution was actually provided by Farmbot's support team that I reached out to via email. Don't be afraid to reach out to others when in need of help!
By far, the most difficult part of putting Farmbot together, was calibrating the z-axis. All in all, it took me 3 to 4 hours a day for a whole week to calibrate the z-axis. By having Farmbot connected to the internet, the user can change any of the values in these boxes.
Every Farmbot comes out a little different, so each Farmbot requires some degree of modification of the individual axis'. In particular, the z-axis shown in the picture below, took the majority of the week to setup. Since the z-axis fights against gravity, its values for min and max speed along with its accelerate for should be lower than its values going towards home, which is up. Because of this constant back and forth, finding the correct values was time-consuming and required lots of trial and error. I would suggest to start off with the default values and change the accelerate for and minimum speed inversely. If that doesn't work, disable stall detection on z-axis and see what happens. For me, these default z-axis values shown above along with disabling stall detection works consistently.
As a quick sidenote, after having completed all these steps and getting Farmbot moving, I think that watching all the videos they released online within their software documentation didn't help that much, as the range of issues in which each Farmbot they produce is too large to have all the possible problems be solved within the short 5 to 10 minute videos. Fixing what issues may pop up require time and patience. Remember to reach out to their support team whenever you need their help.
I'm glad that the Farmbot is able to move. The whole purpose of building Farmbot is to improve on it and make easier to grow plants for anyone, anywhere, I'm going to need to do some more research to make that happen.
Keep Growing!
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