Please Water These Plants

Allow me to introduce you to Arduino. At the simplest level it’s a micro processor that you program to interface with the outside world. The possibilities are endless: make and LED blink, send a tweet to start your coffee maker in the morning, build a robot, or in my case get plants to talk to a computer.

Last month I signed up to do an Arduino workshop at Hackspace Hercules, part of the ThingKing consortium.

The 4-week long course was taught by thing-maker Paul Mesarcik and covered the basics of getting started with Arduino through sensing and interacting with the outside world, culminating in an exhibition at Let There Be Light Studios.

Avid blog readers will know I have a penchant for plants and so I designed an installation around them, interfacing with a computer through capacitive touch.

Each plant was turned into a sensor, that when touched, would communicate with a computer, via Arduino, generating synthesized speech. Touching all 4 in a consecutive pattern would generate the phrase “Please Water These Plants”.

Here is a short video clip of it in action, courtesy of OneKCollection.

Other great projects included an interactive LED display that changed colour via sensors that responded to heat, touch and sound, musical fruit that emitted various tones on touch and even ThingKing’s “Respect” tequila dispenser that sensed a series of actions that would dispense a tot of tequila if performed correctly.

If you’re interested in attending a course to see what you could do with Arduino, get the low-down on September’s course here.

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