Bitponics: Where Urban Agriculture Meets The Internet Of Things
Brooklyn start-up Bitponics makes urban farming a bit more convenient with its smart device and website that helps you manage your greens from a remote location.
In the past we have featured similar initiatives such as Farmhopping, which connects real-world farmers to virtual ones where the real-world farmers would help their virtual counterparts to take decisions on their farm and together manage it as best as possible, combining both their knowledge and exploiting it to the fullest. Bitponics makes all this remote farming a bit more real though, as there are no virtual crops or plants involved with their ‘real-life Farmhopping’.
There is always a risk of finding your lovely little garden (or just selection of plants) all withered and dead coming home to them one night, but Bitponics tries to eliminate this risk altogether by allowing users to track their plants remotely. Checking that they are not thirsty and getting enough (or maybe too much) sun is just a selection of things their ‘Bitponics Base Station’ can do. The smart station collects data from the sensors that are monitoring everything that is going on in the gardening and sends it straight to the cloud, which is in turn accessible by mobile phone, tablet or computer.
Of course it would not be a contemporary product if it wouldn’t incorporate some wonderful community elements. Users are able to upload and share pictures of their plants and rate the ‘Grow Plans’ of other people in the Bitponics community. It is all about collaboration with Bitponics, but mostly about making sure that even in our very fast-paced lifestyle it is still possible to maintain an indoor farm without having to worry too much about it all the time.
