Approaching The Drop Location: Seeds Away!

September 4, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 8 Comments

Arbor Day is a holiday many countries dedicate to planting trees, but with the steady encroachment of climate change, we need to maximize our time. Dronecoria doesn’t just plant a tree; it sows “hectares in minutes.” A hectare is 10,000 square meters or 2.471 acres. These aren’t the drones you’re looking for if you intend a weekend of gardening, this is in the scope of repopulating a forest with trees or reinvigorating a park with wildflowers. The seed balls in the hopper are 10kg of native seeds coupled with beneficial microorganisms to help the chances of each drop.

The drone’s body is laser cut from what looks like baltic birch plywood. The vector files are available in Illustrator (.ai) and CAD (.dxf) formats released under Creative Commons BY-SA, so give credit if you redistribute or remix it. In the 3D realm, you’ll need a SeedShutter and SeedDisperser, and both models are available in STL format.

We have other non-traditional seed spreading methods like canons, but it is a big job, and if you’ve build something to pitch in, drop us a tip!

The Short And Tragic Story Of Life On The Moon

January 23, 2019 by Tom Nardi 66 Comments

The Moon is a desolate rock, completely incapable of harboring life as we know it. Despite being our closest celestial neighbor, conditions on the surface couldn’t be more different from the warm and wet world we call home. Variations in surface temperature are so extreme, from a blistering 106 C (223 F) during the lunar day to a frigid -183 C (-297 F) at night, that even robotic probes struggle to survive. The Moon’s atmosphere, if one is willing to call the wispy collection of oddball gasses including argon, helium, and neon at nearly negligible concentrations an atmosphere, does nothing to protect the lunar surface from being bombarded with cosmic radiation.

Yet for a brief time, very recently, life flourished on the Moon. Of course, it did have a little help. China’s Chang’e 4 lander, which made a historic touchdown in the Von Kármán crater on January 3rd, brought with it an experiment designed to test if plants could actually grow on the lunar surface. The device, known as the Lunar Micro Ecosystem (LME), contained air, soil, water, and a collection of seeds. When it received the appropriate signal, LME watered the seeds and carefully monitored their response. Not long after, Chinese media proudly announced that the cotton seeds within the LME had sprouted and were doing well.

Unfortunately, the success was exceptionally short-lived. Just a few days after announcing the success of the LME experiment, it was revealed that all the plants which sprouted had died. The timeline here is a bit hazy. It was not even immediately clear if the abrupt end of the LME experiment was intentional, or due to some hardware failure.

So what exactly do we know about Chang’e 4’s Lunar Micro Ecosystem, and the lifeforms it held? Why did the plants die? But perhaps most importantly, what does all this have to do with potential future human missions to that inhospitable rock floating just a few hundred thousand kilometers away from us?

Continue reading “The Short And Tragic Story Of Life On The Moon” →

Warming Seeds In An Outdoor Garden

March 4, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

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Spring is almost here and with that the green thumbs out there are preparing for their summer gardens. It’s usually a good idea to get a jump on all your gardening activities by starting seeds indoors, but with this comes the problem of making sure juvenile plants get enough sunlight. Putting a few seeds on a window sill will keep seeds warm enough to start germinating, but that will drastically reduce the amount of sunlight available for any given day. The best solution is to make sure the seeds are kept warm outside, but for wont of a properly placed clothes dryer vent [Tim] decided to make a solar soil heater using junk he had lying around.

[Tim] constructed a simple heater cartridge using a few 5 and 10 Ω resistors. These were sealed inside a piece of copper pipe with heat shrink tubing and silicone. The solution to powering this heater cartridge, though, is an impressive display of thinking outside the box.

The cartridge is powered by a solar lantern – the same kind you’d find illuminating a garden path at night and recharging during the day. After inserting the cartridge in a hill of seeds, the heater provides a little bit of warmth to get the seeds through the night. During the day, the battery in the solar lantern recharges, providing just enough power to cycle through another night.

It works for [Tim] in his native New England, so we’re betting it’s good enough for just about any growing region.