Plants Use Twitter to Tell You to Water Them

ptorrone noted a Make article about twittering your plants just in case you need that sort of thing in your life. And you do. He says "The gang from Botanicalls used one of Adafruit's new open source hardware ethernet shields for Arduino (open hardware too) to make some plants talk — and now you can too! That's right, having your houseplants Twitter you when they need water and more! You can see what one of the plants is doing now..."

tag: sensless

[Anonymous Coward]

tag this one as "senseless"

jeez...

Rather than have the plant call you...

[sacremon]

...why not have it hooked into a watering system directly? That way all you need to do is make sure the reservoir has water in it. Seems a lot less intrusive, and you don't have any potential phone bills from your plant.

Insanely expensive, not "open source"

[SuperBanana]

The Adafruit "shield" uses a $50 (yes, $50) Xport module, which is anything but "open source".

So. $10 for the circuit board, $50 for the module, and then another $30-$40 for the Adruino board.

That's $100 not including shipping...plus the cost of a wall-wart power supply ($10+), ethernet cable ($10-20) and an ethernet port (a couple more dollars- you can get hubs pretty cheap these days)

You could easily hit $150-200 on this project for just getting to know that 2 of your plants need water, something you can figure out by sticking your fucking finger in the soil each morning.