Molemi Personal Food Computer

This page will give a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a Molemi personal food computer (mPFC) that will be used for educational purposes.

The Molemi PFC will be used for both educational and research purposes. We want to start a public research and development in hydroponics farming that will be run by "public scientists".

This document will serve to give a detailed explanation and tutorials on how to build and run a Molemi PFC.

The mPFC will allow participants/collaborators/candidates/makers/tinkers to learn hardware and software development skills specifically in laser cutting, fabrication, internet of things, data science and machine learning.

The Criteria for a general Personal Food Computer

• It needs to be desktop size - the controlled-environment food computer needs to be operated on a desk in an indoor research environment. The recommended size might match the size of regular household appliances such as the microwave,

• It needs to have a wide range of functionalities - in order to make this device a useful for different applications, such as plant phenotyping research and agricultural robotics curriculum, it needs to have a wide range of sensors and actuators.

• It needs to be user-friendly - the user interface that allows users to communicate with and extract data from the device needs to be intuitive, simple and efficient.

• It needs to be low cost - to reduce the cost of the controlled-environment food computer, the use of non-proprietary hardware and software is proposed.

• Open-Source (open information) - the platform and the data generated from the device needs to be shared among different types of users such as teachers and researchers to allow the replicability of the experiments and to analyse the data generated from/by the devices.