The Botanicalls Project is just genius. A small sensor in each plant pot is connected to a telephone switchboard, which in turn can call a number when the soil is dry. Brilliant. OK, so it’s slightly scary too. The thought of your plants randomly calling you at different times of the day or night with requests for water, or thanking you for watering them, is just a bit too Little Shop of Horrors maybe. [Via InventorSpot]
A soil moisture sensor in each plant, simply made of 2 nails and a circuit, sends information to an arduino board which then passes the information to an Xbee network. An Xport is used to send data via PHP to a mySQL database and to Asterisk, which drives the phone calls. The code on the chip averages the data and makes decisions about when a phone call request should be sent. There are set thresholds, unique to each plant, for minimun and maximum soil moisture.
I commend coming up with the idea of the circuit method of telling when a plant is dry.
I also feel that hooking the sensor to the telephone is more amusing as a stunt then it is truly useful.
When not just hook the sensor up to a watering system.
want to know more informations