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...?
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).
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.
Well, even if a fixed schedule isn't adequate, a single (as opposed to one per plant) device that you can use to manually (with a led instead of a full on IP device) evaluate if the plant needs watering and that uses no power between usages would be much "greener".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
17 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] threadNevertheless 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...?
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).
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.
[1]: http://hackaday.com/2011/07/19/chilean-teen-builds-automatic...
[2]: http://hackaday.com/2011/06/28/tweeting-bird-feeder-keeps-a-...
[3]: http://hackaday.com/2011/01/07/internet-enabled-drip-coffee/
[4]: http://hackaday.com/tag/tweet/
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.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Garduino-Gardening-Arduino/
A self-watering container has a commercial name, "EcoBox", bu t are quite easy to make at home.