- CO2. Side note: I was surprised to find that most (all?) CO2 sensors used in closed plant production setups are not meant to operate below 400 ppm.

- Air temperature, pressure, relative humidity

- Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR)

- Addons like: wind speed, wind direction, soil moisture and Electrical Conductivity (EC)

- The coolest and most challenging: pH, EC, and flow rate

The hardest part has been running everything on battery while maintaining accuracy and using LTE (2–4G) and not common LPWAN options like LoRa. I'm primarily a software guy, so the learning curve has been huge.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951495

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

It's a SaaS + IoT + Plant Biology knowledge baked into one package. We are figuring things out on the fly as well (here's a link to one of the products https://www.hexafarms.com/main/hexaos). The aim is that the entire operations should be reduced to manual labor of handling the plants (and our software will inform you about that as well). Vertical indoor farming has been always close to my heart but at this point we address the wider space of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) in general.

> How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?

Yikes! We are also going to be VC-backed soon. Went through Techstars recently. Hopefully, I'd have the humility to accept and not makes claims that go against the fundamental principles of physics, biology, and economics. Sorry but this is the best answer I could give.

We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34981757

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

I learned Elixir for the sake of the joy of learning a new programming language and I kept playing with it for few random days over 5-6 months. Finally, I took the leap of faith and for our startup I started the switch to Elixir + LiveView with minimal JavaScript hooks and I feel a weird bliss that we are two engineer FTEs and I can add features on a daily basis. Why that's the case, I still haven't ruminated myself, but my guess is 1. I have gotten older, 2. Elixir is beautiful and productive by design-- pattern matching, everything is a process (so the dimensionality of time is not an issue at all) and the code is kind of a right balance of simplicity and complexity, and in my opinionated view, there is "one" right way of doing things. 3. Standard tooling (mix, ExUnit). They have enabled us to write really maintainable code and for our next hires, we are willing to pay for them to learn Elixir than switching to other languages. Of course this is only for true for our web app which is actually a weird beast that interfaces farms, sensors, algorithms, and humans.

1. Reading Malcolm X's autobiography _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ in college. It transformed me such that within that one week of reading it, I developed (given my low standards) the strongest sense of orderliness in my life. Additionally, I decided for myself 'to straighten myself up' for this life.

2. Reading Dostoevsky's _Brothers Karamazov_. My 'inner' transformation (at the age of around 20.5) was so immense that it was also apparent from the outside. My transformation was 'not to be surprised by bad/evil' and seeing good in everything.

3. In programming/ computer science/ functional programming/ mathematics (I still don't fully get LISP, Haskell et. al. like other people here) but there are encounters in the field of lambda calculus, computation, cryptography that have left me totally transformed. Too many to elaborate.

Has anyone here been like me and considerably improved their spatial awareness and navigational skill? How?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31882341

Points: 33

# Comments: 34

But, and in all honesty, as a founder, it did/does feel such questions are existential. I used _search-engine_ as a mask, I'm actually building a deep-tech (I've commented/posted on HN before).

When you put everything on the line to build a startup for a mission you believe in to the extent that you can't even separate your existence from your startups 90% of the awake hours, then when such questions come from (this is important) "a specific set of stakeholders", it does become existential. I love being asked all these things from a random person or at a random pitch event. But when you're my colleague, co-founder, or my hero, or a potential investor who I've been in the loop with for weeks, then when you ask such questions, it does get hard.

Someone below suggested that such people probably shouldn't start a startup, but on the contrary, I wrote it not to whine about myself, but only with the sincere hope that if there's someone who is less tougher than I am, he/she would be more cared for (in the odd chance that someone reads it).

The true origin of this post was in my experience with building my indoor farming startup that will grow the best quality produce, cheaper, and way more resource efficiently than traditional agriculture. Ofc I've done my homework and I am actually taking a risk and doing the very uncomfortable by deciding to work on it. Imagine jumping back and forth between research-papers, circuit diagrams, dying-plants, finance, etc. etc., and then someone very relevant asks/tells you "you can't beat the oldest industry known to humankind", or "why can Infarm (a unicorn in the vertical) not do this?", "maybe just work on indoor grow lights (since it fits more into the standard lean startup model". In that moment, it seems existential. Maybe I interpret it wrong, but I interpret it as if you're telling me that my startup shouldn't (can't exist) and yes I'm so obsessed with my startup that I take it personally (again, only when it comes from specific stakeholders). I can give them the numbers, but if they say it can't be done or if it could have been done, it would have been done, then that's same as saying that I should shut up.

I am a first-time founder of a deep-tech, and having secured pre-seed 6 months ago, and now that I have gathered all the evidence for the viability, I would definitely consider approaching something like 8vdX.

First was a firefox plugin, and the first plugin I ever wrote. It basically bans some results from google. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23295989

Second is my current moonshot I'm working on where I was expecting a lot of criticisms and negative comments, especially from programmers/devs in the AI space (Fully AI driven indoor farm, kind of deep mind for agriculture and understanding plants better than any human). But the largely positive feedback of the community was really energizing and uplifting.

Basically, every leafy green (and herbs, and even mushrooms), can grow in a range of climatic condition (phenotype, roughly) ie temperature, humidity, water, CO2 level, pH, light (spectrum, duration and intensity) etc. As you might have seen around the world there is a rise in indoor vertical farms, but the truth is that 50% of those are not even profitable. My startup wants to discover the optimal parameters for each plant grown in our indoor vertical farm and eventually I would let our AI system control everything (something like alphaGo, but for growing plant X (lettuce, kale, chard, ). Think of it as reinforcement learning with live plants! I am betting on the fact that our startup will discover the 'plant recipes' and figure out the optimal parameters for the produce that we would grow. Then, the goal is that cities can grow food cheaper in more secure and sustainable way than our 'outsourced' approach in country side or far away lands.

So now I have secured some funding to be able to start working on optimizations, but I realized that *hardware* startups are such a different kind of beast (I am a good software product dev though, I think). Honestly, if anyone with experience in hardware related startups (or experience in the kind of venture I am in) would just want to meet me and advise me, I would take it any day. Being the star of the show, it's hard for me to handle market segmentation, tech dev, team, next round of funding, European tech landscape, etc. I am foreseeing so many ways that our decisions can kill my startup, all I need is advise from someone qualified/experienced enough. My email: david[at]hexafarms.com