NORWAY — Right now, the farmers at Roberts Farm hydroponics project are doing their best to squash a few bugs — not the kind that ruin your harvest but the kind that keeps your computer from booting up.

“It was working fine the other day, and then I installed a new piece,” said Earl Morse, a retired teacher and volunteer at the Roberts Farm project. “It’s easy enough to fix. I just need to plug it in and go through and check everything.”

He knows it works because the system let the farm grow a crop of spinach last winter in an exterior green house, keeping watch on the soil temperature and interior moisture through freezing temperatures and darkness. It works, not with hundreds of dollars worth of computer equipment but hobbyist-grade Arduino logic boards.

While the farm’s goal is teach local kids about growing their own food and the technology behind farming, Morse hopes to create an automated system that not only gives the plants light and keeps them watered but extends the growing season — and does it cheaply.

He hopes to release it to the public this fall, built on the open-source Arduino system.

“What we’re trying to do is make all the mistakes now, so it’s ready for everyone else to use,” Morse said.

Arduinos are simple, inexpensive logic controllers that are the favorite tool of technological hobbyists.

The inexpensive circuit boards and open source programming language can be combined with motors, sensors, antennas and other Arduinos to design almost anything — from robots and toys to household automations.

“That’s basically what we’re trying to do, make a farm robot,” Morse said. “Maybe a Robot farmer.”

The idea is based on an old system Morse helped design back when he was teaching at the American schools to U.S. Department Defense students in Europe back in the 1980s. The first version was built for an old Atari computer, but the most stable version relies on MS-DOS. In fact, Roberts Farm still uses the MS-DOS version to run its automated hydroponics nursery.

“What it does, this 20-year-old system, lets you match the growing conditions for any location on Earth,” he said. “You plug in the longitude and latitude and time of the year and it matches those conditions.”

The system controls banks of lights over seedling plants, matching the light’s intensity and time lit to conditions anywhere in the world at any time of the year. For example, the nursery’s lights are set to mimic the light outdoor plants would get in central Maine in mid-May, at the start of the growing season.

The system also keeps the seedlings watered, using water from a nearby aquarium to add moisture and fresh fertilizer.

“The problem is, it’s very hard to find a computer these days that runs MS-DOS,” he said. “It’s incredibly reliable, but it is very old technology. When this system dies, it’s going to be totally dead.”

The computer system also has to be locked indoors, out away from the cold, the moisture and the dirt.

Arduinos are perfect replacements, he said. They are small, easy to program, can be purchased for around $17, are very adaptable and require a fraction of the electricity a standard PC needs to run.

The farm set one up in a greenhouse this winter as test, letting it control a bank of lights and grow a crop of spinach.

“What we want to do is be able to use every greenhouse to grow four crops per year, all year long,” Morse said. “Summer, winter, it won’t matter.”

Morse said he envisions three versions of the Roberts Farm software. The first version, the one under development now, will control the lights, monitor the ambient temperature, water the plants and warn the farmers if there’s an intruder.

Version two would replace Morse’s MS-DOS application, letting the farm give seedlings light and water designed to match that of any location on Earth at any given time of the year.

The third version would add livestock management to its suite of abilities, managing the farm’s flock of chickens.

“Let them out in the morning, and in at night, keep them fed and watered,” he said. “And it has an intrusion alarm, warning you if there are predators around.”

Do you know a creative person with a technological bent? We’d love to talk to them. Contact Staff Writer Scott Taylor at [email protected], on Twitter as Orange_me or call 207-689-2846.