Ok, this has to be one of the coolest things ever! It’s called, “Botanicalls,” and it’s a project aiming to save plants’ lives by notifying humans of their health status via phone calls. I love it! I have a hard enough time trying to keep track of my (not real life) plants on Final Fantasy XI… let alone what real life plants I’ve had. This is definitely something I would invest in! You should check out the audio samples of the phone calls on the site too… it cracks me up! In thinking about this, my brain waves start to fire up. What if they… or someone… could develop this technology further to where a device, or a set of devices could monitor plant health details such as mineral/food /water, etc… and would be able to upload that information via Wifi to a website listing up to the minute stats on all selected plants. And then one could work to connect a watering/feeding system up to a Linux server. I could really get into that. Hrm… a good idea for a programming project. LOL. I can see it now… future jobs posted for Botanical Systems Administrators… “I need to update that cron job to water those plants more frequently this month…” Or, “I need to modify that Perl script to start adding minerals to the feeding process…”
:: ramblings ::
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
That’s pretty cool! The video on the site says it operates by conductivity between 2 sensors, which, to me, looked to be to nails with wires. That would be a pretty simple system: water conducts electricity, so, if the soil is moist, the circuit is complete, and the plant won’t need watering. If the soil gets dry, the circuit will act as though a switch has been opened, and this will send a signal to the computer that the plant needs watering. I’d like to get Mom to try this at home… I think it’d be a great experiment! The only part I’m not sure how to do, is how to signal the computer when the circuit is broken (soil dry). Anyway, cool post!