Periodic Reporting for period 1 - miniSun (Disrupting the horticulture industry with smart lighting solutions)
Période du rapport: 2022-12-01 au 2023-11-30
Traditional agriculture is problematic. Indoor farming is a possible solution. But it has its own problems - energy need for lighting and lack of crop diversity. This is not only for vertical farms but also for greenhouses.
Because of the further progressing climate change the established agriculture will not be able to grow crops the way they used to have. With seadily increasing temperatures harvests get burnts during the summers, so agriculture must move north (where the countries are not prepared for agricultural of that scale) or must transits into a more adaptable culture to be not affected by the natural surroundings. Next to harvesting problems triggered by the climate change, conventional growers need to think of a ways to grow crops with less resources e.g. water, airable land, etc.
Horticulture can help with all the challenges mentioned above.
Where Greenhouses would give the opportunity to still make use of the sun, the increasing temperature from the sun would lead to burdening costs for the climate control.
Since the Vertical Farm is a closed environment system, it needs the complete artificial lighting, but allows the farm operator to control everything else much easier than in a Greenhouse.
So far there is no artificial lighting solution that would allow a vertical farm to produce crops that need sun light spectrum with a good energy efficiency.
Crocus Labs will fill that gap. With our own LED we will give customers a sun like spectra with a high energy efficiency. We are achieving this result by combining our own proprietary LED chip, with our own power supply design, sensor solution and data analytics.
Because of the further progressing climate change the established agriculture will not be able to grow crops the way they used to have. With seadily increasing temperatures harvests get burnts during the summers, so agriculture must move north (where the countries are not prepared for agricultural of that scale) or must transits into a more adaptable culture to be not affected by the natural surroundings. Next to harvesting problems triggered by the climate change, conventional growers need to think of a ways to grow crops with less resources e.g. water, airable land, etc.
Horticulture can help with all the challenges mentioned above.
Where Greenhouses would give the opportunity to still make use of the sun, the increasing temperature from the sun would lead to burdening costs for the climate control.
Since the Vertical Farm is a closed environment system, it needs the complete artificial lighting, but allows the farm operator to control everything else much easier than in a Greenhouse.
So far there is no artificial lighting solution that would allow a vertical farm to produce crops that need sun light spectrum with a good energy efficiency.
Crocus Labs will fill that gap. With our own LED we will give customers a sun like spectra with a high energy efficiency. We are achieving this result by combining our own proprietary LED chip, with our own power supply design, sensor solution and data analytics.
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(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) 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.
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(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) 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.
KPI1 : Annual lighting cost per sqm cultivation in vertical farms
D2 : smart driver unit - We have demonstrated 19% better efficiency at a commercial farm (Urban crop solutions) compared to the system they are currently using.
KPI2 : Technology obsolescence for customer
D2 : smart driver unit - Our smart driver unit helps customer not only create sun spectra but also adjust this spectra to change certain parameters in the crop. With the opportunity to use state of the art driver that can provide high efficiency dynamic lighting capabilities protects customers from obsolete technology
KPI3 : Sun spectra
KP 4: Overall energy efficiency compared to state of the art horticulture lighting system
D2 : smart driver unit - We have demonstrated 19% better efficiency at a commercial farm (Urban crop solutions) compared to the system they are currently using.
KPI2 : Technology obsolescence for customer
D2 : smart driver unit - Our smart driver unit helps customer not only create sun spectra but also adjust this spectra to change certain parameters in the crop. With the opportunity to use state of the art driver that can provide high efficiency dynamic lighting capabilities protects customers from obsolete technology
KPI3 : Sun spectra
KP 4: Overall energy efficiency compared to state of the art horticulture lighting system