

DIY Kit Allows Plants To Tweet When They’re Thirsty - techverde
http://crispgreen.com/2012/01/diy-kit-allows-plants-to-tweet-when-theyre-thirsty/

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icebraining
I love the irony of this being posted on a "green" website when it's an
obvious waste of energy (both to build and power) compared to just keeping a
decent watering schedule.

Nevertheless I like the build, although something using ZigBee would be more
handy, unless you only have a couple of plants, otherwise the cabling might
become unwieldy. And I wonder if there could be some way of extracting energy
from the plant itself, making it self sustainable...?

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gte910h
Many plants are greatly over-watered.

Electronics such as this are usually asleep, drawing tiny amounts of power (we
had one in a shipping container that needed it's battery changed no more than
18 months).

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groggles
A decent watering schedule is not an overwatering schedule. Watering plants
properly is not a difficult activity.

Further even assuming that it is very low power, just the energy and materials
used to construct it blow away any notion that it is green.

This is an anti-green product. It is using products made via energy and
chemical rich processes, then vampiring power, to solve a complete non-
problem. It is novel, and it's right for HN, but the GP's point is completely
on the money.

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jimrandomh
Nifty, but I suspect that running two wires (power and ethernet) to every
sensor is a nonstarter in serious applications. You'd really want it to have a
battery and a wireless radio.

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lutorm
Funny, I'm pretty sure when I saw them at the Maker Faire they used one base
station and an xbee on the sensor units. That was a few years ago, so maybe
they must have "simplified" it.

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patrickk
Cool idea, but perhaps a better idea would be to actually water the plant
automatically when the plant needs it, rather than just tweeting about it. See
Garduino for example:

<http://www.instructables.com/id/Garduino-Gardening-Arduino/>

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Steve_Harlow
This is a cool MVP, but the real value of something like this comes from its
future development. When they are able to have the device tweet that the plant
needs Nitrogen or phosphorus (and eventually the ratio), then it becomes
something that can be really useful. This is especially true if they develop
it with some fickle plant's requirements in mind. Then even a novice indoor
gardener could keep a zebra plant or other more difficult plants to maintain.

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sown
You could make a self-watering container and use pex tubing to deliver water
from somewhere.

A self-watering container has a commercial name, "EcoBox", bu t are quite easy
to make at home.

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mobileman
Aren't plants deterministic with water consumption. I can see the value of
this in so far as data mining an optimal schedule, but it isn't green nor
scalable.

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lutorm
I remember seeing this at the Maker Faire a couple of years ago, but then they
called you instead of twittering. Pretty hilarious.

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tomthorns
Surely it could draw it's power from the ethnet cable instead of requiring a
separate power supply?

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alexlitov
Finally a good use of twitter

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icebraining
There are some nice builds out there using Twitter, like the Seismic sensor
made by a 14-year-old[1], a bird feeder[2], Tweet-a-Pot[3], etc[4].

[1]: [http://hackaday.com/2011/07/19/chilean-teen-builds-
automatic...](http://hackaday.com/2011/07/19/chilean-teen-builds-automatic-
earthquake-alarm/)

[2]: [http://hackaday.com/2011/06/28/tweeting-bird-feeder-
keeps-a-...](http://hackaday.com/2011/06/28/tweeting-bird-feeder-keeps-a-
picture-record-of-all-visitors/)

[3]: <http://hackaday.com/2011/01/07/internet-enabled-drip-coffee/>

[4]: <http://hackaday.com/tag/tweet/>

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TheAmazingIdiot
Knowing the margins on marijuana from dispensaries in California, this would
be useful in their watering schemes.

I believe 1 oz. is around $150 for average weed there. So if this setup costs
a tiny bit extra in energy costs (after artificial sunlight) and an arduino
per 8 plants, it'd be awesome.

Of course, this tech could be used in other non-quasiillegal plants as well.
Some things are just hard to grow.

