Hey folks ! Its been a while since I've worked on this project/updated this page !! I've kept this project on the back burner and in my back pocket for a while for a number of reasons:
- Component Shortage of 2020/2021 made sourcing key components and parts for this project impossible or with very long lead times
- I had plans to commercialize this technology into a startup company (if you looked closely no sources were ever released under any license)
- I haven't had a lot of time to work on this project and prioritized other endeavors/projects

- Working on this massive project alone without any collaborators is very tiring and requires a lot of effort.

It is now 2024 and I am a different man and things in my life are going well. Some long time friends near and dear to me have been working on similar agriculture automation efforts and have spent a considerable amount of time conducting research and data collection in similar areas but in a lot of areas that I haven't even gotten to with my own projects. They have spent a considerable time farming heirloom varieties of various vegetables and learned a lot about these plants. I myself spent last year growing tomatoes and other vegetables (before the rabbits killed everything but the tomatoes) in an outdoor garden I built using organic soil and fertilizer as a learning exercise. After a lot of thinking I have decided that it would be best to join forces and put all our efforts into one project, and collectively document everything in one place. 

I have done some research and have come to the conclusion that an automation system like Agricolutura-IO doesn't have any real commercial potential, on the surface it sounds like a big money making idea but the truth is plants are really good at taking care of themselves as long is you follow a few basic ideas. Humans have been farming successfully for 1000s of years and scarcity of farmed food has mostly been an engineered problem and it would make more sense to use this project to solve that problem rather than contribute to it. Hence the this update "No Commercial Potential" those of you that know me well know that I am a big Frank Zappa fan and that his music and ideas have been a big influence on me most of my life, hence the borrowing of the title. Also I want this project to be fun and satisfying and if I were to commercialize it there would be a lot of fun/creative aspects of it that would have to be sacrificed. I am doing this project for me, I am doing it for my friends and with my friends and I am doing it for the people of the world to make them more free !

Watch this page very closely !! I will be releasing all the hardware and software sources under strongly reciprocal open source licensing so you can use what we create here or contribute yourselves via pull request! Lets build open source automated farms all over the world, lets end starvation , lets make everyone more free together !!

Viva La Revolution!!