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Comment by tylerjaywood | Hacker News Reader

I have a house plant that is watered automatically, but not based on any pre-determined schedule. I have the plant's livestream and its moisture level available publicly on pleasetakecareofmyplant.com and the decision to water is crowd sourced on reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant by way of a daily vote.

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I'm truly amazed that this has been going for over a year now and the internet hasn't murdered it

Some have tried, but it would take some coordinated effort over several weeks at this point to over or underwater the plant. I've found that the folks who consistently vote take it relatively seriously to the point they have discussions about optimal schedules and for the most part stick to them.

I'm glad that these people exist but on the other hand It's hard to imagine what they do in everyday life that this topic is so interesting to them, that they want to feel this responsibility for the plant.

Communities can form around the weirdest of things, and when they do, social ties keep the original reason going.

That's a beautifully succinct explanation of the Internet.

They've also done a lot to enrich the whole community. The daily plant gifs and a monthly voting graphic overview post have been put together by folks in the community.

How did you end up getting people interested/wanting to participate? I feel like that's the biggest hurdle.

sounds like bitcoin lol

this is extremely wasteful

automated gardening would be far more productive, and make significantly more progress

go and write an automated-voting-bot in the with optimal schedule for the plant

fight fire against fire :)

What moisture sensor are you using? That's always been a sticking point for me, where soil moisture sensors just don't work, unlike air moisture sensors.

It's very simple -- something like https://www.amazon.com/Moisture-Humidity-Compatible-Atomic-M...

Due to the volume of the pot, it would be difficult to get a true moisture reading, so I place the sensor directly under the spout in order to have noticeable changes.

we do this for a ag product

http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/soil-moisture-online/

which can use a number of different sensor makes, but http://www.decagon.com/en/soils/volumetric-water-content-sen... seem pretty good

Associated HN discussion currently on the front page:

Please take care of my plant | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15453974 (100+ comments)

And the link: http://www.pleasetakecareofmyplant.com/

This couldn't backfire. I like it.

The worst case scenario was me trying to keep the plant alive, so it was really all upside.

This is fantastic. I had a similar idea but it was for a friend of mine. She constantly made the wrong choices in life and I'm positive things would turn out better if she crowdsourced all of her decision makings.

Very cool! Can you share the hardware setup you have?

Yeah, there are some affiliate links on the main page of the website, then a link in the header to 'how it works' shows a bit more. All of the code is mostly on github. (I was still learning how to use git for this project, so its not perfect)

If you have any more questions feel free to post them in the sub and I can explain more!

Very clever, I like the project. I'm a fan of the pin too.. can there be a fridge magnet version?

haha I can snip off the pin and super glue a magnet to the back of one if you want. They haven't been selling well enough to recoup the initial production cost so I'm hesitant to expand the product line.

Do you have limits to prevent over or under watering?

Sounds like that would defeat the entire purpose, as well as prevent anyone from caring whether they participated.

Yeah, so it's not water on demand. That was my original idea but obviously that posed some risks to the dryness of my floor and the relationship with my landlord.

How it functions is a daily yes/no vote that triggers a watering event for that day.

Edit: Oh, but to I think the real question -- No. It's not my plant anymore as far as I'm concerned. The community can care for it as they see fit. I won't interfere, except to add features, or put up seasonal decorations :)

this is extremely wasteful

automated gardening would be far more productive, and make significantly more progress

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