DIY Kit Allows Plants To Tweet When They’re Thirsty

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...?

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.

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:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Garduino-Gardening-Arduino/

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.

You could make a self-watering container and use pex tubing to deliver water from somewhere.

A self-watering container has a commercial name, "EcoBox", bu t are quite easy to make at home.

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.

I remember seeing this at the Maker Faire a couple of years ago, but then they called you instead of twittering. Pretty hilarious.

Surely it could draw it's power from the ethnet cable instead of requiring a separate power supply?

Finally a good use of twitter

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.