Alert: Your Plant Needs Water

Twine is an interesting looking product, and 'connected everything' is most likely the future, but using tech to tell you to water your houseplants screams of engineering a problem to match a solution. (Which is, of course, the foundation of geek society.) Besides: I water my army of jades once a millineum (give or take a thousand years). If I go too long between waterings: no worries, they just grow roots above the soil and take water from the air.

Plants aside, I'm rather interested in where the 'connected universe' will take us. I'd much rather have my washer/dryer push a notification than buzz loudly or sit idle. Likewise with the snail-mail box once the postman's left a letter. And micro messages from my plants/oven/door mat shouldn't be hard on bandwidth; just a drop in the bucket compared to media delivery (video).

This to read the full thing: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q&esrc=s...

A hacker friendly gardening solution.

http://makeprojects.com/Project/Garduino-Geek-Gardening/62/1...

Hope the Twine ships eventually, it's such a slick solution. A few years ago I wired up my office basil plant to a moisture sensor so it could post to its Facebook page (Basil Green) when it needed watering. Being tethered to a computer was sort of overkill since the real data rate was three or four bits per day.

Wondering: a device to monitor devices that can fail silently, good. But it needs two AAA batteries. When they discharge, does Twine fail silently? Do I need another Twine to monitor each Twine? Wait.. that can't work.

Screw plants. Leave the washing machine alone. Just give me a WiFi-controlled wall switch and it will be a huge step forward for everyone interested in home automation.

Sounds like a distracting hell that I have somehow managed without.

I wouldn't mind an autonomous squirt-gun that can distinguish between crows and cardinals, and can keep the former out of my bird feeder.

I read this as "Alert: Your _Planet_ Needs Water"

False: My cat ate my only plant.