Using technology in a permaculture system

I'm curious, have you tinkered at all with computer of any type doing some of your work? My thought is a WiFi or Bluetooth based system that trips an electric motor at the end of the day to pull a chicken tractor 20 feet at 1mph. Any thoughts or experience there?

Here's Grant's answer from the Welcome thread:

Grant Schultz wrote:

Josh Ritchey wrote:I'm curious, have you tinkered at all with computer of any type doing some of your work? My thought is a WiFi or Bluetooth based system that trips an electric motor at the end of the day to pull a chicken tractor 20 feet at 1mph. Any thoughts or experience there?

There's been some work with this on Farm Hack http://farmhack.net/tools/solar-powered-chicken-tractor

(and more to come)

Farm Hack open-sources ideas like this, so by all means experiment and GET AN ACCOUNT there: http://farmhack.net/user.

Timer switches are inexpensive ways of doing what you described without any wifi component, but Arduino units are an easy way to add that sort of functionality (if you see utility in that functionality)

I was wondering if you'd thought about farm scale seed ball technology. I was specifically thinking about a mechanical device that forms the balls (like a concrete mixer), and another that disperses the balls using compressed air to shoot them from one spot.

I image that a field could be seeded very quickly with a dispersal gun like that. It would also be awesome to shoot

Nick Kitchener wrote:I was wondering if you'd thought about farm scale seed ball technology. I was specifically thinking about a mechanical device that forms the balls (like a concrete mixer), and another that disperses the balls using compressed air to shoot them from one spot.

I image that a field could be seeded very quickly with a dispersal gun like that. It would also be awesome to shoot

Seed balls are a cool idea for guerrilla gardening, but I prefer the simplicity of a broadcast spreader. They're everywhere, they're cheap, and they work.