This week, we were to think about the following questions:

How would you scale the production of your final project beyond producing just one sample item? Will you sell it? License it? Is it a business, a service or a product?

Bamboco was designed as an automated herb garden for my small balcony, with no ulterior commercial objectives.

But I do think that an off-the-grid, easy-to-maintain hydroponic garden, made with natural materials, could be commercially viable. There are already several different hydroponic systems available in the Portuguese market, but most are plastic-based and electricity-dependant. Helas, to make this product sucessful, there is a main hurdle to overcome -- its high production cost.

Indeed, this is not a cheap system -- the prototype is made with 30mm plywood and 40mm cork panels which were leftovers at fablab EDP and fablab Lisbon; but the truth is that these materials are quite pricey if bought new. The same goes for the bambu tubes -- widely available in many parts of the world, they are expensive and hard to source in Portugal.

The materials for the prototype cost about 250 euros. So Bamboco would have to sell for at least 350 euros a piece, in order for this to be profitable endeavour. And this price tag seems to be a bit steep for a small home garden...!

An alternative would be to use cheaper materials: replacing the cork and plywood with MDF would lower the cost quite a bit. The solar panel can also be cheaper -- instead of a 20W panel, 10W is enough to make the Bamboco work.

Irrespective of its possible commercial value, Bamboco will be under an open license, so anyone can freely reproduce it: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.