A fully automated, fully modular vertical farm in a cube you can carry. The plants sit in trays, a robot moves them between the levels, and an app on your phone runs the whole thing — designed for a place where nothing grows in the ground.
Food on the Moon or on Mars is a problem nobody has solved yet.
Growing flat wastes the one thing a habitat has least of: space. Growing vertically fixes that, but every vertical farm that exists is the size of a building — it gets installed into one, not carried to one. So we built a vertical farm that comes apart into modules, travels up in pieces inside a rocket, and goes back together where it lands.
Before building anything, we went to see a real one.
For building our project we studied the field and visited a vertical farm in Zürich. YASAI walked us through every sub-system they run — light, water, nutrients, logistics — which is where most of what this farm does well came from.
Our execution
Scroll, and the farm takes itself apart.
Explore the farm by yourself
An ESP32 board they designed themselves
Two iterations: the second one added a MOSFET for the 12 V lighting, split 5 V and USB-C power, and labelled every terminal. The farm runs the whole show locally and serves a JSON API.
One app for every device
A Flutter app for Android, iOS, Windows and macOS talks to the board over JSON. The ESP32 opens its own access point, so the farm works with no Wi-Fi anywhere near it.
CoreXY, borrowed from 3D printers
Two Nema 23 steppers stay fixed at the top of the farm and drive both axes over belts. Precision, no vibration, and no motor riding along with the load.
The farm looks at its plants
A Raspberry Pi 5 runs PlantCV next to the controller and measures how big the plants have grown, then sends that back to the ESP32 over serial.
We won 3rd place at the European Championship in Slovenia and the Team Award.
wro-association.orgFuture Innovators
The open category of the World Robot Olympiad: teams of two to three build their own robot around the season theme, with a free choice of hardware, software and sensors, and everything has to fit into a 2 × 2 × 2 m booth. The judges look at the robot, but just as much at the idea behind it — the research, the innovation and whether it could work as a business. Farmatic ran in «Robots assist life in space», on robots that build living habitats and find resources, and is built against four of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
