Open Weed Locator - Part Two

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

See-and-spray technology enables site-specific weed control. Saving farmers money by only spraying where absolutely necessary. OpenWeedLocator is an open-source project to empower farmers to build their own see-and-spray units. The total cost for parts, says Guy Coleman, is around $400.

Coleman… “It was a a hundred-odd dollars for the - $120 with the Raspberry PI 4. Then I think the camera is roughly $99 - $100. The other major part is the, uh, relay control board which is about $12. And I think a few of the connectors are fairly pricey. Just the ones we chose because they're weather proof. I think there are about $20 to $30. But bringing it all together, you end up with about a $400 unit. So it's considerably cheaper or low-cost I guess.”

In its current form there are limitations. It’s currently designed to spray weeds in fallow situations, but William Salter says it’s only a matter of time before the community iterates the product to target specific weeds.

Salter… “It's the training of those algorithms that's the big bottleneck, but that's certainly an area that our group is working hard in as well. It involves humans telling the computer what is a Palmer amaranth weed (for example), and what isn't, and that is quite time consuming.”

Find the OpenWeedLocator on GitHub for more information.