Farmshelf has built a completely autonomous system that allows individuals, residential communities, and restaurants to grow food on-site, creating a space for urban farming. In order to create, test, and improve their unique hardware and software platform, they extensively use Ultimaker 2+ printers, which allows them to make many design improvements for large, modular custom parts systems that would otherwise require a lot of time and money to outsource.
Although the Farmshelf team clearly knows what they need to accomplish with their flagship product, the engineering of an autonomous process involving living organisms is a tough challenge.
In addition to meeting the stringent engineering requirements for each part and subsystem, they also need to produce a large number of custom plant enclosures, mounting brackets, and so on.
They also need to test these parts by continuously harvesting these edible plants. Traditional manufacturing methods not only mean high costs—it would be impossible to try and grow a successful company this way—but any missteps in traditional manufacturing could set the garden's value and crops back by months.
Freedom to Design and Change
As Andrew Shearer, CEO and founder of Farmshelf, he realized early on the value that 3D printing technology could bring to his business.
He said, "As a company, you can look at 3D printing as a way to get more people involved in the build process, and more prototyping and dreaming, all thanks to how easy it is to use."
Andrew Shearer inspects a plant pod
By integrating Ultimaker printers into their design process, Farmshelf is able to customize and reshape parts on-site.
As a result, they maintain challenging production requirements for necessary functionalities, using them to design early product prototypes for their plants.
Instead of rolling the dice to determine the success or failure of each round of custom parts, Farmshelf finds economically viable solutions at every stage from prototyping to production. 3D printing meets all the needs of design and laboratory research.
"The Ultimaker has proven to be a great solution when we prototype all these parts. For all our different needs, from prototyping to small-batch production, this technology has allowed us to accelerate our timeline and keep this company growing rapidly. Building hardware is always difficult, but Ultimaker makes it much easier."
Close-up of Farmshelf plant pods
With 3D printing adopted in-house, the Farmshelf team only bears the cost of prototype parts.
Outsourcing would result in costs for materials, suppliers, and services, as well as the bottleneck of waiting for new rounds of custom parts changes, slowing everything down.
Jaesong Yi, Farmshelf's product designer, said, "Without Ultimaker printers, we would have had to use off-the-shelf components, and we would have had to design our product around those off-the-shelf parts." Or worse, we would have had to machine parts in large quantities using CNCs, which would be a time-consuming and costly process. Having Ultimaker machines allows us to stay within the design process."
Product Expansion and Installation
The conclusion is a direct reward for the Farmshelf design team. Not only can they customize parts freely, quickly, and efficiently, but they also have functional prototypes that allow them to test products throughout the entire plant pod growth cycle. In turn, product expansion is a more efficient and money-saving process, enabling the team to install and showcase beta models in various high-profile public places without impacting the budget.
Farmshelf plant pod design loaded into Ultimaker Cura
"Simply put, Ultimaker 3D printers allowed us to build early Farmshelf prototypes," said Gabe Benton, Farmshelf's botanist.
"Because the number of plastic parts we use in our system is custom, I can't even imagine how many tens of thousands of dollars it would have cost us to manufacture these parts without them."
Custom parts printed on Ultimaker 2+
After saving time and money producing plant pods and various parts, they seized an unexpected opportunity a few months ago to share their product with the world.
The Farmshelf team was invited by world-renowned chef Claus Meyer (co-founder of Noma) to install a fully functional Farmshelf unit in the heart of Grand Central Terminal in New York City.
This experiment proved highly successful, with Meyer's Great Northern Food Hall restaurant at Grand Central being able to harvest microgreens and some leafy greens directly from these prototypes.
Drawing inspiration from this early success at Grand Central Terminal, they continue to expand on their initial concept and innovate in part to create a bright future for urban agriculture.
Original source: https://ultimaker.com/en/stories/52419-farmshelf-cost-effective-custom-parts-for-an-urban-farm-system