Top products from r/Automate

We found 30 product mentions on r/Automate. We ranked the 16 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top comments that mention products on r/Automate:

u/salikabbasi · 5 pointsr/Automate

i am not an authority, in fact i know very little, but a few things come to mind. this seems more like an agricultural/botany/marine biology degree you'd need with automation on the side than it is primarily automation related. all things considered, at present, it is not more profitable to do stuff like aquaponics/hydroponics/etc for growing food crops, where automation can play a substantial role, unless it's for high end organic markets. but who knows, in a few years maybe there will be more awareness of our impact on oceans and there might be a demand for organic, eco-friendly solutions to people's taste for seafood.

that too is only aquaponics. aquaponics is essentially a hydroponic system with fish/shellfish/etc growing in tandem. the fish waste is broken down by bacteria, and turned into plant food in-system, naturally, with a bit of a guiding hand to make it stable, and the plants in turn filter the water, absorbing/capturing and in a way creating an environment suitable for composting the waste into a substrate, making the water suitable for the fish. leafy things, salads for example, have better ROI, but again, stuff destined for high end, organic markets.

there's some interesting work being done with saltwater systems, seaweed + shellfish and freshwater systems with shrimp. since they grow faster than fish they let you harvest both quicker, but again it's problematic, since it's more efficient with less particulate matter, so the bigger the system the more the cost to filter out said particulate in different ways. i know of a friend who was pursuing an aquaponics venture on the side for essentially desert regions, the middle east especially. but he had to scrap the project. there is little demand for 'locally grown' things there right now, everything's brought in fairly easily owing to their relative independance in terms of energy and there is little awareness to bank on. but they do have money, and despite what people like to think, they're reinvesting heavily and not going anywhere. if at some point in the future there is such a demand, it might be very viable in a place where water is important to conserve.

the barriers to aquaponics are both economic (it is still too cheap to grow on soil, likely will be for a while) and demand/market based (the world over, there's very little demand for organic and ecofriendly outside of developed countries).

plant tissue culture seems to be a viable line of work. a lot of companies spend many years breeding and selecting and modifying plants, and you may have heard of companies like monsanto who have seeds that will only produce one generation of plants. even getting to that though, is obviously expensive, and steps need to be taken to insure a quick and consistent return on their investment. there might be certain varieties that don't bear viable seeds at all, but are still good candidates, in which case, cloning (as with cuttings) are the only way to propagate them.

tissue culture keeps you from wasting valuable plant tissue, and allows you to produce hundreds and even thousands of clones from one donor. it's an important step when you're testing particular strains for their properties, resistance to the elements, etc, because you need enough to gather significant data. the problem is, that this is labor and skill intensive, and essentially requires enough space for people to work in a lab. the lab itself has to be a cleanroom, which means the cost of air filtration and the like, which obviously mounts if the space is larger. there is also an extensive process of figuring out what mediums work best, or even at all. some plants don't take to already formulated mediums, in which case new ones have to be derived and tested fairly rapidly. prime area for automation and smaller footprints.

with tissue culture, the market is already established well, and there's a lot of funding and momentum put towards it, since its pretty much biotech 101 and a very versatile tool. regardless of where the plants end up, now or in the future, the barrier to improvement is technological, not financial, and the demand for cheap, competitive products is deafening, so there are plenty of careers to be found there and plenty of new ground to be broken and adapted to. there is likely a large market for cheaper products catering to smaller companies, and even governments that are keen on further developing their own programs cheaply, along with academic institutions all the way down to dedicated hobbyists. note, all of these people practice this already, I just mean there's room for optimization. tissue culture is pretty much the go to method for preserving and propagating orchids, for example (a niche market sure, but the same applies to a bunch of different plants that have similar appeal). dare i say, if in a few years marijuana becomes legalized, there will be plenty of small enterprising groups looking for cheap ways to store and propagate hundreds of different strains.

i mention both aquaponics and this, because while the latter might be a good candidate to be your bread and butter, the former is a good candidate to keep an eye on for pioneering entrepreneurial projects, and i figure it's likely to play a large part in our future. that said, tissue culture seems a bit harder to pick up, but still very doable. I don't think you could specialize in it and be competitive purely online unfortunately. I'm reading up on it myself off and on, and while it's not too expensive, i suppose it is a bit harder to get your foot in the door than making a small aquaponics setup. tissue culture is practiced by gardeners the world over all the time, as part of a hobby and even for small commercial setups. for aquaponics, you can head over to /r/aquaponics .

for tissue culture, the book i've been reading is supposed to be a bit dated, but is a great, easy to follow introduction, and it's called "Plants from Test Tubes" by Lydiane Kyte. It's been around for a while, so I'm sure you could ask around locally for a copy in a store, if you just want to take a look. the amazon link is here:
http://www.amazon.com/Plants-Test-Tubes-Introduction-Micropropagation/dp/0881923613

anyway, I hope this has been of some help.

u/[deleted] · 14 pointsr/Automate

I think automation will lead to radical abundance, openness, and decentralization (checkout /r/Rad_decentralization). Quite the opposite of a socialist state controlling production, but also a greatly reduced role of capital. Libertarian Socialism probably.

Chris Andersen's books convinced me of this, [Makers: The New Industrial Revolution] (http://www.amazon.com/Makers-The-New-Industrial-Revolution-ebook/dp/B0083DJUMA) and [Free: The Future of a Radical Price] (http://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson-ebook/dp/B002DYJR4G). We're going to see the sort of market forces that upended the news and music industries when they went digital soon applied to physical goods. As Anderson says, atoms may soon become basically free like bits.

As more and more product designs become digitized in a way where 3D printers and similar technologies can manufacture them, openness becomes almost inevitable because it's nearly impossible to stop piracy (like with music). Near complete automation, combined with open designs, drives costs towards zero.

Anderson talks about how information becoming free on the Internet made a lot of classic economics wrong. Reputation instead of capital largely became valuable as the cost of serving a single customer was too small to care about charging for. Ads turn reputation into capital, but reputation is what really matters. The open source world largely operates off reputation too, and we may compete more for the dopamine kick of up-votes than dollars in the future.

Affordable 3D printing and related technologies are handing the means of production over to the people. The need for centralized capital-heavy or state controlled manufacturing is disappearing.

I'm a big proponent of a Basic Income to get us there. Whether it'd be a fair system in the long run, I'm not sure.

u/Quipster99 · 2 pointsr/Automate

Perhaps you'd enjoy the book Robopocalypse... I couldn't set it down once I started on it.

Edit: Oh cool! Sounds like they're starting filming of the movie adaptation this year too, bonus.

u/LocalAmazonBot · 4 pointsr/Automate

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Amazon Smile Link: http://smile.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/ref=sr_1_1


|Country|Link|Charity Links|
|:-----------|:------------|:------------|
|USA|smile.amazon.com|EFF|
|UK|www.amazon.co.uk|Macmillan|
|Spain|www.amazon.es||
|France|www.amazon.fr||
|Germany|www.amazon.de||
|Japan|www.amazon.co.jp||
|Canada|www.amazon.ca||
|Italy|www.amazon.it||
|India|www.amazon.in||
|China|www.amazon.cn||




To help add charity links, please have a look at this thread.

This bot is currently in testing so let me know what you think by voting (or commenting). The thread for feature requests can be found here.

u/benjamindees · 1 pointr/Automate

This doesn't really answer your question, but I'm pretty happy with the Sharp Grill 2 Convection microwave. It's a combo microwave and electric oven, which can do some cool things with cooking meats especially. The major limitation is in the pre-set programs, which are clearly designed to prevent you from burning your house down or killing yourself eating undercooked food.

u/IamBili · 1 pointr/Automate

Starting from here:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession#Forest_succession

> https://www.amazon.com/One-Straw-Revolution-Introduction-Natural-Classics/dp/1590173139

The core idea is that, for the project to implement long-term food production and other resource productions, extracted from a forest with rich biodiversity, the earliest stages requires the heaviest human intervention, with the possible need to import fertilizers to the land, and as the system evolves to a climax forest, the system no longer needs imported fertilizers to sustain itself, and human intervention becomes less blunt and more surgical

We can use all currently avaliable tools and technologies for humans to monitor and intervene, and for harvesting resources from tall trees, we can use drones . The great diversity of resources here allows us to be self-sufficient in several different ways

u/killerbuddhist · 7 pointsr/Automate

I recently read The Everything Store which is the story of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. One of the really interesting parts of the book was about the differences in how Wal-Mart and Amazon operate their warehouses. Wal-Mart has a difficult time trying to be Amazon with walmart.com because Wal-Mart's entire infrastructure is optimized for pushing mass quantities of merchandise out to the stores. Selling individual items to individual consumers doesn't fit well with their operations. Wal-Mart has an edge over Amazon in purchasing power that comes with the quantities they deal with but once the items get off the container ship from China, everything Wal-Mart does in their operations goes against what they need to be doing to take on Amazon.

u/HiccupMaster · 11 pointsr/Automate

I had to take a supply chain management class for my degree. Along with the text book the teacher also had us read this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397485408&sr=8-1&keywords=the+goal

It's an allegory so it's not technical by any means but gives you an idea on how to think about all this stuff.

It's a really easy read, should only take you a day or two.

u/blank89 · 3 pointsr/Automate

Look, whether we're off Moore or not has nothing to do with automation. If performance is the issue then you need to look at all of the variables I previously listed, plus some (e.g. number of cores). What matters at the end of the day is performance per dollar.

That should be 5 times 10 to the 9 hertz not 5*109 hertz (also 5 times 10 to the 24). I think that's just a bug in the Reddit quoting feature if that's what you're talking about. What I'm saying is that there are physical processes that happen at much greater speed than the ones we currently use to implement transistors. There is nothing that says logic must inherently be implemented as the flow of electrons through a circuit. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OOmSyaoAt0) does a good job of explaining the "worst case memory bandwidth" you are talking about, however, the Professor talking is calculating the speed for the visible light spectrum. I'm saying we aren't limited to that. That is not the end of the spectrum. I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about.

If you are talking about this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Controversy), then whether the D-Wave computer is a quantum computer or not may depend on papers that were published last month. Have you read them? Ultimately, the limit to computing is much higher than you think it is. This paper provides more details. http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043v3.pdf

"Is that supposed to mean DNA or evolutionary?" If you mean evolutionary algorithms, no that's not what I'm talking about. Though, I happen to know quite a bit about both. I'm talking about physical DNA (as in the stuff in biological cells). I'm sorry, you must not be up to date on the latest DNA computing technologies. There is currently research into creating logic gates with DNA. The signal is propagated by protein concentration. Other technologies include wrapping light responsive molecules with DNA using DNA origami. I suggest you read this book (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-DNA-Self-Assembled-Computer-Design/dp/159693168X) for more information. DNA happens to be easily assembled by existing proteins, so the self assembly part is not as challenging as you might think

Based on your confusion over DNA vs evolutionary computing, I don't think you do know more about the other computing paradigms than I do. You need to provide some sound evidence for your claim that "DNA doesn't work" (correct me if I'm wrong, but that is way too fuzzy to be a scientific claim). How do you know that it will take 20 years until non-photolitho processors will exist? Do you have a post graduate degree in Physics, Computer Science or Computer Engineering? I'm afraid I can't just take you at your word. If you have data that computing will stagnate for decades, then please present it.

u/mhornberger · 1 pointr/Automate

I think a good question would be--how do we perceive automated news stories we were told are automated, vs ones we weren't? The book Automate This talked about computer-generated symphonies. When people just listened to the music, they were deeply moved by it. When they were then told that it was created by a computer, their assessment changed retroactively and they could "just tell" that it lacked something, soul, the human touch, whatever. If they were told beforehand, they couldn't enjoy the music, and found it cold and mechanical. So we're dealing with that psychology. That people think they can tell the difference doesn't mean they actually can.

u/vermont-homestyle · 3 pointsr/Automate

This may not be the best way, but a fairly simple (and not too costly) solve I can think of is to use If This Than That (https://ifttt.com/). I would start by linking one of their email services (easiest might be the Gmail one, with a custom gmail you set up and have forwarded the sales email) to something like the DLink Siren

u/Bob_goes_up · 1 pointr/Automate

It is not so difficult to make sushi rolls, but you need to find a show that sells eatable raw fish. Here is a thingie for making the rolls.

http://www.amazon.com/Flat-Sushi-Bamboo-Rolling-Mat/dp/B009UXGBQK

u/PROJECTime · 4 pointsr/Automate

I think what you are looking would be a Cellophane Bag sealer and amazon also sells bags for it and only $25. But I have no personal experience with these.
https://www.amazon.com/Impulse-Sealer-Cellophane-Bag-sealer/dp/B000UVMKO8

u/Yasea · 1 pointr/Automate

I base my opinion on Capital in the 21th century, Why nations fail and this IMF note and few others that I didn't save the links for.