I’m starting a new project!

I’ve been working my way around trying to come up with a new project to start recently. It’s coming up to winter and I need something to do now the nights are drawing in and I can’t go out on my bike as much. Honestly, picking a project to do has been a really tough challenge for the following reasons:

• It needs to be doable inside, and I have no garage currently so things like motorbikes, cars, metalwork etc are out.
• It needs to be reasonably cheap. I mean in the sense that; if you’re talking about building a campervan or restoring a motorbike you’re £10k down the pan by the time you start.
• It needs to be novel. Sure, I could build a weather station or one of those daft magic mirrors that tell me the weather and how many meetings I have to look forward to today, but what’s the point?

I spend a lot of time coming up with new project ideas or new startup ideas (i’ll be honest, the two very often intersect). The biggest problem I’ve found is that everything’s been done. I’ll be thinking of some new Arduino project then do a quick Google search to find you can buy one for £1.42 including shipping from China, which really takes the wind out of your sails. The same can be said for apps / startup ideas. You’ll come up with some new idea for a recipe app which uses stuff in your fridge using image recognition. You’re psyched about your new idea, then you look on the app store to see 15 other people have poured their hearts into creating far better apps than you’ll ever create and have a grand total of 15 downloads.

I went around and around this problem for a couple of months, coming up with gems such as:

• An app that aggregates all the 84 million apps you need to pay with your phone in car parks (great idea tbh, but yawn).
• A language learning app that uses LLM’s to create a text message like interface. A great idea, but Duolingo nicked it. In unrelated news, if anybody wants to buy languagegpt.com I’m open to offers.
• A case management app for solicitors. I’m bored just writing that.
• Build a campervan. Good idea but megabux. £30k at least to build something good.
• Get a puppy. We actually went to look at a puppy, but it sexually assaulted Bruno so we gave up.
• Restore a bike / car / speedboat. See above.

Alright, so what are you building?

I’m going to build a fully automated hydroponic indoor garden. The core concept is that you should be able to plant some seeds and do a bit of initial setup then walk away and it’ll grow your seeds for you. It’s going to:

• Be fully cloud connected and controlled, IoT style. So you can monitor your grow and make changes to your setup from anywhere in the world.
• Be fully automated. so it’ll manage:
  • Water circulation
  • Nutrient levels and concentration
  • Lighting
  • Water Ph
  • Heat
  • Humidity

The design brief here is a Google simple interface that allows you to fully automate growing your own produce.

Cool, why bother?

Firstly, its fun. Also it matches all my above criteria. It’s not mega expensive, can be done indoors in my cellar and has enough technical novelty to keep me entertained.

But mostly, I think there’s a real need here. I personally would like to reduce my carbon footprint by eating less meat. However, vegetables come with their own complications. Mainly that I need to keep going to the shop to buy more because they don’t keep for very long.

I also like to think big, and on a global level the way we grow and consume food is inherently unsustainable.

Traditional farming methods use almost everything is an unsustainable way. Potable drinking water is thrown onto fields only to evaporate the same day. Soil is tilled repeatedly until it loses all nutrition, turns to dust and wastes away. We spray chemical insecticides all over plants which then leeches into the surrounding environment, harming wildlife.

And that’s only to grow the stuff! To satisfy our year-round desire to eat bananas we ship fruit and vegetables across the planet in plastic single-use packaging only for a large portion of it to go ‘out of date’ on supermarket shelves.

What if we could change this. Hydroponic farming has existed for a long time but the barrier to entry is extremely high and the ongoing maintenance burden is even higher. What if we could simplify or even remove the learning curve and get rid of the maintenance burden? What if you could simply set up your kit, plant some seeds, walk away and then come back and pick your peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes or whatever else?

If we could do for hydroponics what windows did for personal computing or the Spotify did for music streaming then I’m convinced we could get people eating healthier food and reduce our global carbon footprint.

Let’s find out!