Urban Agriculture: Getting Started With Indoor Hydroponics

January 25, 2018 | ProgressTH.org Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil. It allows food to be grown virtually anywhere. It is a technical method that is easy to learn and get into, but takes a bit of time and patience to master. Luckily, it is not as intimidating as it may seem, and as more people begin experimenting with hydroponics, the wealth of information they are sharing online makes it easier than ever to get started.

Why Hydroponics? 

The dense urban sprawl of Bangkok makes it very difficult to grow your own food with traditional means. Safe soil in an open space with adequate sunlight is hard to find. Even on Bangkok's many rooftops where open space exists, bringing soil upstairs and maintaining a garden under the beating sun and amid flocks of marauding birds is a lot harder (we've found out) than it seems.

Hence hydroponics. With hydroponics, you can grow food anywhere. Outdoors, indoors, with or without access to sunlight and without any need for soil. After experimenting with rooftop and balcony gardens with mixed results, hydroponics enabled us to finally grow enough food, indoors for daily consumption.

For now we are growing only salad greens. But hydroponics can be used to grow a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. It is just a matter of adjusting your grow space, containers, nutrients, and lighting, all of which we will explain below.

Grow Space

Urban Agriculture: DIY Hydroponics Shelf

December 2, 2017 | ProgressTH We have experimented with indoor gardening before. Using 30W and now 50W LED floodlights, and a wide range of grow boxes and grow shelves, the final and most efficient iteration has been our hydroponics shelf.

The original hydroponics shelf (above) used MDF panels covered with aluminium tape and a 5V fan from an old grow box experiment. The red plastic covers were 3D printed, but virtually any sort of opaque plastic can be used as a cover.

The shelf began as a steel STACKO brand heavy duty shelf we attached the MDF panels of an old DIY grow box onto, including a 5V fan for air circulation. We added an aquarium air pump to aerate the AB nutrient solution put into modified 6L plastic water bottles. Foam squares were fitted into 3D printed covers to hold the plants in place.

We managed to grow several salads' worth of greens so far, and there are now many more on the way.

3D Printed DIYbio Opensource Centrifuge

November 21, 2017 | ProgressTH Our 3D printed DIYbio centrifuge v 2.0 is operational. With version 1, we used a brushless motor used on drones which required an electronic speed controller and an Arduino microcontroller just to get it to spin. This version uses a simple 12V DC motor controlled by simply flipping a rocker switch.

A microswitch located near the cover cuts the power when the cover opens, and returns power to the motor when it is closed. It is a common safety feature found on many laboratory micro centrifuges.

Because it is much simpler and because there is a lot of extra space in the housing, a lot of expanded functions can be added later by users. While this version does not require a microcontroller of any king, there is plenty of space to add one (for timers or other functions).

Check out all the files here on Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2598206

Check out a quick video demonstration here:

For information on a simple DNA extraction protocol we've used in the past which utilizes a micro centrifuge, see here.

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3D Printed Scale Model RX-2 Chaipattana Low Speed Surface Aerator

November 13, 2017 | ProgressTH During a recent visit to the park, I noticed several different models of surface aerators working to keep water circulating and from becoming stagnant. One was pulled out of the water for maintenance allowing me to get a closer look. It seemed very simple and the thought of creating a floating platform with 3D printing began to grow.

Upon doing some research, I discovered the differences between the different models here in Thailand, including one of the first in Thailand and the inspiration for the design and distribution of many more around the country.

It was the RX-2 Chaipattana Low Speed Surface Aerator which was designed and built under the direction of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. While it serves the same purpose as other aerators, it does so in a very different way.

A central wheel slowly spins, lifting perforated buckets out of the water and allowing them to slowly drain with a rain-like effect.

The resulting scale model is part a tribute to the late King, part 3D printing experiment, and part kinetic sculpture.

3D Printed DIYbio Orbital Shaker

November 11, 2017 | ProgressTH Orbital shakers are used to agitate substances in closed vessels such as jars, test tubes, and enclosed bioreactors.

Our design utilizes 608zz bearings (x6), a 12v stepper motor and driver, a potentiometer, and an Arduino Micro Pro to create variable, smooth, and reliable orbital motion control.

The files, including the Arduino sketch and the SketchUp file we designed it in are all up on Thingiverse here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2633507

Wiring diagrams and additional resources will be added soon. The platform itself was specifically designed to be removable via 3 bolts. This allows users to create custom holders to keep their vessels secure while in motion. The platform moves very quickly at full speed.

A quick video demo can be seen here:

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3D Printed DIYbio Centrifuge V 2.0

October 21, 2017 | ProgressTH This new version of our original F.Lab centrifuge​ we are working on will use a 12v DC motor, and a basic rocker switch to make the simplest and easiest centrifuge design possible. However, the design includes provisions to add in a microswitch to automatically turn off the motor when the cover is open, and a microcontroller (Arduino Nano) for timing functions.

Additionally, the actual centrifuge rotor has been slightly modified in SketchUp to include more sides and thus produce a smoother circumference. This may help further stabilize the rotor while in motion.

While the brushless 1806/2400 drone motor was strong and fast enough, it was expensive, a bit more difficult to find for those who don't order online, and interfacing with the ESC via an Arduino is not easy for many beginners who might otherwise want to tackle the project.

The thought process behind this new version is to make a platform simple enough, and with enough options for modification and improvement so that more people build the design.

From the beginning, we plan on offering two versions that will be available on Thingiverse, one with a solid fully 3D printed cover, and one that integrates acrylic so the rotor can be viewed when in motion. This lets makers who have access and experience working with acrylic have the option for a window, while the solid cover is easier for anyone with a 3D printer to make regardless of their resources and background.

We were pleased to see others make our original centrifuge including Make Magazine​. Japan-based maker Shingo Hisakawa has already improved upon the original design, offering his improvements here for free on GitHub​. We hope this new version attracts even more enthusiasts to try out opensource DIYbio hardware.

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3D Printed Loom

August 6, 2017 ProgressTH We've designed and built a 3D printed rigid heddle loom. It is a tool used by hobbyists for weaving yarn into fabric and is a great way to understand the basic principles behind how more complex looms work and learn the craft of weaving itself.

It is the first step toward an automated tabletop loom aimed at enhancing localized textile production.

This 3D printed rigid heddle loom is the first step toward making textile production more accessible. Work on perfecting the current loom design, producing accessories such as loom shuttles and reed hooks, and development of an automated tabletop loom will follow.  

The loom is about half a meter by half a meter in dimensions allowing you to weave patterns up to 400mm wide and with the warp beam system, a half meter or more in length.

The loom costs approximately 400 THB (12 USD) in PLA plastic filament to 3D print. Additional parts include approximately 3.5 meters of cheap 22mm PVC pipe and a handful of common nuts and bolts.

Because the design is opensource (all files and instructions are available here on Thingiverse), anyone can access the SketchUp design files and modify or expand on it as long as they share it too.

Why Build a 3D Printed Loom? 

We built this loom to answer the questions: where do the clothes we wear everyday come from, and is it possible to localize their production?

3D Printing Turns Browsing for Fun to Building for Real

June 4, 2017 ProgressTH 

At one point or another while browsing a magazine, a store, or online, you'll find something interesting you wish you could have for your own but for whatever reason can't get a hold of it.

That's just what happened when browsing pictures of Japanese-style lanterns and coming across a picture of an Edo Period wooden lantern. Normally one would day dream for a moment about what it would be like to have one of their own. With 3D design and 3D printing they no longer have to day dream. They can simply deign and print out a replica of their own.

Depending on your skills and the amount of free time you have, that replica can range anywhere from a quick "sketch" model or an intricate and precise replica. For the Edo Period lantern, it was somewhere in between because of the straightforward design itself.

And now, thanks to open online 3D model libraries, you can download and print out this lantern for yourself.

The lantern project pictured above is now freely available on our Thingiverse page for others to download, print, or modify.

Make Magazine, Biohacking, and 3D Printed Centrifuges

March 30, 2017 ProgressTH 

Volume 56 of Make Magazine recently hit the bookshelves here in Bangkok. The theme was biohacking and the powerful way technology and more importantly, collaboration is transforming the way we research, develop, and devise ways to improve our understanding of biology and how to apply it both for agriculture and human health.

We were particularly grateful to have our 3D printed centrifuge featured amid the many other incredible projects in this issue.

Also in this issue was an article written by Jose Gomez-Marquez who is co-founder of the MakerHealth and Maker Nurse projects. In his article he shares:

Over time, industry slowly black-boxed our medical technologies and discouraged makers from participating - but they never went away. Today, life science and health makers form networks like MakerHealth and DIY bio communities. They fuel open protocols and cheap instrumentation.

He then shares some advice on how you can get started:

Need a place to begin? Start with a teardown and remake what you see at the doctor's office.  

Jose captures precisely both the motivation that drives our projects, as well as the process we've gone about pursuing them.

The 3D printed centrifuge is just a starting point, and we shared it online for everyone to see and build themselves not only so they can make copies of it, but to also improve upon it or even use it as inspiration to tackle other pieces of essential laboratory equipment.

3D Printing + Vacuum Forming

February 12, 2017 | ProgressTH 

Vacuum forming is a process involving heated, flat sheets of plastic placed over an object, and pulled around it using the suction of a vacuum. It is used on scales large and small, to make everything from handheld projects, cases for electrical equipment big and small, and even things as big as refrigerator liners.

Creating your own vacuum forming system is fairly simple, and lots of hobbyists around the world have been doing it for years.

With 3D printing, even if you lack a place to do wood or metal working required to make a vacuum forming box, you can print out and assemble one, which is what we did. That box is now up on Thingiverse here.

3D Printing Brings the Museum to You

January 30, 2017 | ProgressTH 

Museums are great places for people to connect with history. Seeing the physical objects otherwise only learned about in distant classrooms can make an impact on people young and old alike.

And while there are interesting museums almost everywhere you go, wouldn't it be nice if you could sometimes bring the museum to you?

3D printing is now making that possible. Many museums are 3D scanning objects in their collection and posting them for free online. This allows anyone with a 3D printer to download and print out the objects.

Depending on what the object is, you can either print out a scale model of it, or a full-sized version.

And that is precisely what we decided to do to put this concept to the test.

The British Museum, located nearly on the other side of the planet from our office, is home to the Gayer-Anderson Cat, an Egyptian statue cast in the Late Period some 2,600 years ago. The museum 3D scanned the statue and uploaded it to MyMiniFactory, an online 3D model library, alongside a large number of other items.

Without the base, the model is 340 mm tall, too tall for most 3D printers. Using Netfabb Basic, a free software tool, we cut it in half and began printing it. In one day the Gayer-Anderson Cat materialized in our office, full-scale.

Medical Maker Project Continues

January 17, 2017 | ProgressTH

Since mid-2015, we've been working with the Queen Sirikit National Institute of Child Health (QSNICH) based here in Bangkok to develop prototypes and working articles for nurses, technicians, and doctors to improve their workflow and overcome challenges they face in their day-to-day routines.

This year we aim to expand this program further, by organizing regular hackathons that pair hospital staff up with designers and engineers in one and two-day sessions to solve even more problems and reach out to more hospitals and medical institutes.

We also hope to encourage QSNICH and other hospitals to consider bringing fabrication in-house, with their own biomedical designer to work with staff on a day-to-day basis. While we have been able to cut down time by years and reduce costs significantly, in-house operations overseen directly by the hospital would speed things up even further.

To see what's been done so far, take a look at these 7 projects.

1. Dermatology Tool 

Children in the dermatology department were easily scared by existing tools used to take skin samples for diagnosing conditions.

The solution was a customized 3D printed plastic bladed tool created in a variety of colors and featuring different cartoon characters on the end of the handle.

3D Printed IoT Weather Station

December 20, 2016 | ProgressTH 

We've been working on a weather station over the past week or so, ever since we took part in FabCafe Bangkok's FARM HACK 2.0 event. With a team of Thai and Singaporean designers and engineers, a basic data logger emerged to automatically record temperature, humidity, and light level readings from a DHT11 sensor, a basic photoresistor, and coordinated by a WiFi enabled development board called a NodeMCU.

The weather station, designed in SketchUp before being 3D printed and assembled this week. 

The NodeMCU transmits the environmental data from the sensors by WiFi to an online platform called ThingSpeak created specifically for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

There, you can see live graphs (Weather Station 0001) of your sensor data. ThingSpeak also allows you to download all of your data which you can then put into a spreadsheet either offline, or online using Google Sheets to work on it further.

The basic temperature, humidity, and light level readings were just to work out how to gather and send data. After FARM HACK 2.0 was over, we began building a solar powered station that could be placed anywhere, gather and transmit data, and serve as a platform to add in other sensors (wind speed, rainfall, soil moisture, barometric pressure, etc.) and even link the station into automation to control processes like irrigation.

Visualizing Sensor Data

December 13, 2016 | ProgressTH

Over the weekend, FabCafe Bangkok (Facebook) hosted a two-day workshop gathering engineers, designers, and farmers for their second FarmHack event. Two teams worked on two projects; a weather station connected to the Internet, and a bee counter for measuring the health of a bee hive.

Our team worked on the weather station. Using the NodeMCU (a development board with a WiFi chip on board) a light sensor and a combination temperature and humidity sensor, we were able to gather and send 3 readings to the Internet using a service called ThingSpeak.

ThingSpeak allows users to gather and use information for a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) projects. In our case, we wanted to collect and visualize the sensor data.

Visualization via ThingSpeak can be embedded into any website with code automatically produced within your ThingSpeak channel.

Urban Agriculture: Rooftop Garden Update

November 27, 2016 | ProgressTH Part of what ProgressTH does is advocacy, the other part is putting ideas into practice. While our rooftop garden is small, it is a proof of concept with the ability to expand both at this particular location, and on other roofs nearby.

Growing Barrels 

Originally, we were using raised beds with ferroconcrete panels. This was labor intensive, time-consuming, and left the soil laying right on the rooftop. Having sourced relatively cheap 200L HDPE blue barrels, we ended up with a light-weight solution that easily allowed us to double our soil volume and keep the soil off the rooftop.

3D Printing: Custom Ventilation for Air-Warmed Blanket

November 20, 2016 | ProgressTH As part of ProgressTH's collaboration with local children's hospital, Queen Sirikit National Institute of Child Health (QSNICH), we were presented with a challenge in distributing warm air evenly through a custom made blanket used to warm babies during surgery.

The blanket consists of 3 evenly-sized pockets connected at one end through which warm air is introduced via a mechanical blower.

When the air is blown in, it moves directly through the middle pocket, bypassing the other 2 on either side. Creating a 3-way duct with plastic tubes of equal diameter also resulted in a similar phenomenon.

Producing even air flow into all three pockets required borrowing some ideas from interior ventilation systems. Recall how ventilation ducts differ in diameter, becoming smaller as they work their way deeper into a building's interior from fans conditioning and pushing air from a single starting point. The smaller diameter creates even pressure and equal distribution throughout the system, otherwise the air would simply move in the straightest, easiest path possible, bypassing vents along the way.

You can find more information, including diagrams, here at ventilation-systems.com.

3D Printing: Resting Hand Splint Could Save Hospital Hundreds of Dollars

November 17, 2016 | ProgressTH For children with certain conditions, hospitals will fit them with a resting hand splint. They must form to the child's hand very specifically for maximum comfort, must breath, and must be light.

Thermoplastic usually performs at least a few of these requirements well. However sheets of the plastic lack holes for ventilation. The other problem is, for Bangkok-based Queen Sirikit National Institute of Child Health (QSNICH), reliable thermoplastic suppliers offer sheets that are very expensive, perhaps 4,000-5,000 THB (115-140 USD) a piece and might make between 5-10 splints each.

As an alternative, hospital staff began looking for alternatives and eventually contacted ProgressTH to explain the problem.

We started by tracing a volunteer's hand and 2/3 of their forearm on a piece of paper. We scanned it and imported the image into SketchUp.

Solar-Powered Moisture Sensor and Irrigation System

October 19, 2016 | ProgressTH At a recent FARM HACK event at FabCafe Bangkok, our team developed a working prototype for a solar-powered, Arduino-driven, soil moisture sensor and irrigation system.

It has a moisture sensor that triggers a servo-driven valve to open or close. It draws power from a store-bought power bank that we charge with a solar panel running through a 5 volt regulator. The power bank needs to be able to charge a device while also charging. If not, the circuit will turn off your project while it's charging.

The prototype was just to demonstrate the concept but it was far from ready to actually go outside in a rooftop garden. So we designed a weatherproof 3D printed case.

Hackathon Connects Farmers with Designers, Makers, and Engineers

October 17, 2016 | ProgressTH Things like laser cutters, 3D printers, and electronic prototyping tools like Arduino are often in the news and attract a lot of attention. But after seeing demonstrations, art projects, and toys, many people ask themselves, "what next?"

FabCafe Bangkok's FARM HACK helps answer that question by taking the maker, designer, and engineering community out of their respective spaces and placing them together with real-world farmers and the challenges they face to see if an innovation solution can be developed.

Last weekend, four teams matching two farmers up with two designers, engineers, or makers set out to do just this.

The Game Plan 

The event was carefully planned, providing a viable template for other events like it covering not only farming, but many other aspects of life as well. It began by bringing in guest speakers to present how they are already implementing social and technological innovations to improve farming. The purpose of this was to give teams a starting point and some ideas.

At the FARM HACK event, we heard from FarmD Asia, who uses basic ideas of automation to enhance agricultural processes, and in particular, indoor mushroom cultivation. There was a professor from a local agricultural university describing advances in agricultural robotics. And finally, we heard from Heart Core Organic, a very large and successful urban agriculture network in Bangkok that links urban farmers together, organizes farmers' markets, and raises public awareness regarding natural, local food.

Then the teams formed up and began working on their projects. These teams included activists working on egg farming as a means to raise money for hill tribe schools, a team focused on rooftop farming, and a conventional farm looking for a way to automatically plant seeds in starter trays.

The Results

In just two days several prototypes were created. A few years ago, not much more than drawing and maybe static models could have been created in a two-day hackathon. Today, thanks to the personal fabrication technology available at makerspaces like FabCafe, working prototypes are so easy to make, as one team pointed out, most of the time was spent on thinking of a solution, with digital design and fabrication almost an afterthought.

Epipen goes from $300 to $30 to $3 with Opensource and 3D Printing

October 10, 2016 | ProgressTH Corporations will take as much as the public allows them to. It is ultimately up to the public to represent their own best interests, and unrealistic to expect corporations or the governments charged with reining in their behavior to keep abuse and overpricing in check.

While the US government held a hearing regarding Mylan's EpiPen pricing in which a package containing two of the devices costs a whooping $600 ($300 per device), little appears to have been done except provide the public with the belief that "something" will eventually be done by what is a clear case of price gouging.