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East Central, Nebraska | its always fascinating to see what other farmers are doing in this maker space, to see what they are incorporating into their own operations. we dont see them too often on here but when we do its something that i find incredibly interesting. i would say for the last 10 or so winters i have been trying to scrape together any extra time i get during the winter to do similar projects. one of my first projects was a much simpler version of grain bin monitoring. I took steel cables and attached dallas DS18B sensors to the cables and ran them from the lid ring down to the floor in many of my grain bins. i had intentions on taking it further but for the last how many years we have had incredibly dry grain and i kind of lost interest. at the beginning i made a handheld device out of an arduino to go around and read the sensor values, later i made the devices log the data and had a display on them so i could walk up to the bin and read the values and previous data. as i said i had intentions of taking it further and lost interest mid way. i was working on a remote system at the end but my bins are spread out miles apart and it wasn't all that feasible.
later I started messing around with automation for pivot irrigation, i wanted to make low cost pivot monitors. i believed i could have done so at a small fraction of what i was and currently am paying. the devices themselves at $1000 per unit weren't really as much of a nuisance as much as the annual subscriptions were. i eventually became content with what i was paying and felt that the companies offering brought lots of value until recently that company got bought out by valley and they are destroying the part that was good about the service. these boards have came a long way since i got started, ardunio's boards and cloud have taken huge leaps. last year i used an arduino mkr1010 to control the heat in my shop, sure i could have bought a wifi thermostat but learned a lot about the arduino cloud and their boards going this route. now that i am feeling really familiar with that ecosystem, qualcom buys arduino and the whole maker world is freaking out about the new arduino EULA and there are a hundred videos on youtube telling me to stop using the arduino platform, great.
anyhow, i have never really successfully taken my projects to the depths i would like them to reach as every year i get a little older and as soon as i start rolling on a project good planting is starting again and then i forget half the stuff when i get back to them the next fall and have to relearn it all over again. i have a goal to try and work more steady through this winter and stick with it throughout the next season but at the end of the day i dont see myself doing anything earth shattering and never have had any interest in selling a product. maybe if i get something i am proud of i may try to contribute the project to others as others projects have inspired me.
i would think the biggest challenge of trying to sell a product that someone else is already making is you would have to simply have a better product or it be less expensive. and if your going to sell it you need to be able to support the product, then you need to be able to expand upon the product because while you were supporting it someone else made what you did better or cheaper. just seems exhausting to me. i am not saying it isn't a good idea, just saying i have done a lot of thinking about if i had a good idea how i would market it so that others could use it for much less of the cost of a commercially made product but yet make it worth my time. with that said i don't want to act as if i have a great idea and i just don't know how to take it to the next level, i dont.
anyhow. i wish you luck on your venture. if you take it further or end up showing the world what you have going on it would be great to see it. good luck.
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Made a DIY Internet Connected Grain Bin Monitoring System
