If you’re the kind of person who might need a little nudge to remember to take care of your plants, here’s a fun device that will send you such reminders.
The Botanicalls Kit connects your house plant to Twitter and will send out tweets whenever your plant is a little parched. Once you’ve topped up your cactus or spider plant with a little H2O, the kit will send its thanks, too.
The DIY kit requires some assembly (including soldering), and the messages are preprogrammed, though you can customize the tweets to say anything you like. The device contains a chip, steel probes to measure moisture levels, and an Ethernet adaptor.
You’ll need to move fast if you’d like to pick one up, since there are only 12 available at SparkFun. Each sale of the $99.95 kit will aid development of the Botanicalls project, which aims to create new interactions between plants and people.
If giving objects a little more life is your thing, keep an eye out for Twine, a project that gained recognition through Kickstarter. Rather than simply letting you know when your plants need a drink, Twine promises to hook just about anything in your home up to the Web and send you alerts for specific actions through Twitter or email.
If only we can get a device that will send a tweet when milk’s going bad, I’ll be able to enjoy my morning coffee a little more.
Photo by Botanicalls