Our activities in WP 1 – Crocus Luminaire (HW optimization)
We have successfully started the front-end process of our own LED chip manufacturing with two partners. Novagan and TopGaN. We started the process with Novagan first. After we made the decision for TopGaN as our second front-end partner, we started the process for a second batch of wafers with TopGaN. During the back-end process our back-end partner Lukasiewicz found issues with the wafers from Novagan and we had them send back to Novagan for further processing. Because of that issue we will have a delay of the deliverable for Task 1.1 of around 3 month.
We further developed our PCB design for the next off the shelve LED luminaire generation.
The smart driver design was finalised in time and is showing good results. Both driver design and our corresponding software dashboard for the tuneable spectrum may be adjusted for our own LED PCBs. Together with our partner Elnux we successfully manufactured our own designed DC/DC drivers.
Our of the shelve LED luminaire x3 is the first generation of manufactured luminaires. Doublepower!!! our manufacturing partner has produced 200 unites of our x3 luminaire.
Our activities in WP 2 – Completion and integration of the software components (Crocus Engine)
Until the end of 2022 we were using a third party app solution to tune our luminaires. Thanks to our team members we were able to build our own solution which runs on an AWS cloud server. The software is able to adjust each kind of LED to generate a unique light spectra.
We are in the finalisation of our first sensor box which will be integrated into our software to show the sensor data in the dashboard.
Our activities in WP 3 – Testing and validation activities
We have built a test farm in the basement of our office in Berlin – Ostkreuz. Up to date we have conducted the following crop experiments to research light spectra and compare our luminaire against competitor lights: red basil, Genovese, spinach, salad. In January 2024 our experiments with tomatoes will start and strawberry trials start by February 2024.
External research projects with IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute (already started), The James Hutton Institute (start in January 2024), Enza Zaden (start around January 2024) and others are in the process.
Our activities in WP 4
Current decline in investment and growth in vertical farming market in Europe made it clear that the industry needs more standardized unified knowledge and better tech solutions to help it stabilize and move to profitable development.
We are currently reaching out to potential Vertical Farm companies (both system builders and Crop growers) to partner with them for pilots to test our current and future luminaires. Furthermore, we are in conversations and collaborations with different research institutes from the horticulture field to test the current and future products as well as gain the knowledge & reputaion in the field.
We see events being a great way to gain user insigths as well as get propspecting leads. That is why we visited & exhibited at various events like IPM Essen, GreenTech Amsterdam, F&A Next, Vertifarm, ExpoSe and Agritechnika.
We developed connections to a lot of partners over our whole supply-chain to have at least two partners for each process. We are trying to have all our partners in Europe to have a better control over the logistic. But this comes with higher productions costs.
The current patents have all been submitted and we are waiting to get them granted. Next to that we have regularly meetings to discuss our tech pipeline and future potentials IP.
!!! I was not able to add our first patent - CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT AGRICULTURE METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PLANT CULTIVATION on SyGMa. The patent is published on the DPMA website as pending (
https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/pat/register#position2(opens in new window)) but the SyGMa system is not accepting the respective patent number and since it is not confidential anymore I can not add it as confidential patent because its embargo date is already in the past.!!!
Our activities in WP 5 – Management of innovation activities
We have weekly meetings for the tech department, business development and one with the whole team, were we track the work and adjust the project plan if necessary. We have quarterly OKR meetings to plan the next steps and goals to archive the milestones. During the quarter we have small OKR reviews to adjust the OKRs if necessary.
At the start of the project we conducted a risk management workshop to collect, discuss and evaluate potential risks and how we can mitigate these. We hold be-weekly meetings to discuss the situation, check current and potential new risks and develop risk mitigation scheme for these.
