This is the 9th 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.
I spent the entire summer working on building the raised bed, figuring out how the bot-axis is going to work, and yes, successfully installing the robot to take care of my plants!
Farmbot has a guide online on how to make a raised bed with its exact dimensions, but I want to make a taller box, so I had to adjust their specification to fit my needs. While constructing the planter box and the mechanisms for the robot, I noticed that following the Farmbot instructions directly was slowing me down. Every step of the way, I had to adjust their specification to my project's dimensions. I decided to write my own instructions so I could move from one step to another swiftly. Below are some of the photos of my work on the build.
I learned quickly that nothing goes smoothly when constructing objects, even when it's as simple as a box with legs. A problem I encountered was that the wooden board the soil would rest on wouldn't fit within the dimensions of the legs and the walls. To cut such a large thin piece of wood, I needed to use a table saw and push the board through it, cutting it at a perfect length.
I am proud of what I've been able to build this summer. I learned how to use a handsaw, then graduated to use power tools, a table saw, drills, drill bits, bolts, nuts, washers, and even the different types of wood that Home Depot has. If I asked myself a year ago, that I genuinely want to visit Home Depot, I would call myself bananas.
In the next post, I'll share the details of installing the robot and bringing the Farmbot to life.
Keep Growing!
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