WisePlant

Inspiration

A friend of ours was asking a simple question: “Why can’t I have something that tells me when I need to water my plant?!”. That triggered the idea of building something that makes the plant send data like this without plugging anything into the wall.

What it does

WisePlant is a hardware component that turns any plant into a digital device. It can sense things like temperature, light and moisture, and send that data to your phone over bluetooth. Plus, it is fully powered by solar energy!

How we built it

We got an Arduino board, and connected a bluetooth module, RGB LED, and sensors for temperature, moisture, and light. We wanted everything to be solar powered so we got a charger board optimized for solar charging and hooked it up to a LiPo battery.

The software component of WisePlant is an Android app that reads sensor values through bluetooth and visualizes the current state of the plant, with an emphasis on what the plant needs.

Challenges we ran into

Soldering for the first time was a big challenge. We wanted our device to be packaged nicely, so we spent some time to build a custom-soldered breadboard to drive the sensors.

Also, finding the right components to make solar work was challenging. We wanted to use green energy and did not want any wires to be sticking out of the plant. So we had to get the right voltage for the Arduino board, get a battery that can draw enough current for all the components, and a controller board that optimizes the charging process.

Accomplishments that We’re proud of

We are proud that we learned hardware fast (both of us are software people), and integrated it with software that resulted in a very responsive experience. The second there is a change in the physical environment, you see that on your app. We are also proud that this all runs on solar!

What we learned

Hardware rocks! Prototyping with hardware has become way easier with open source projects like Arduino. Where is gets complicated is when you want to balance a lot of functionality with a simple and small package. For example, we had to make sure that all our sensors are 3.3V compatible because a 5V Arduino required a battery and a solar panel that were too big.

What's next for WisePlant

We would like to add Wifi to WisePlant so we can send an SMS (with Twilio) telling you if the plant needs watering, light, etc, regardless of your location.

Built With

• android
• android-studio
• appengine
• arduino
• bluetooth
• java
• javascript
• light-sensor
• moisture-sensor
• solar
• temperature-sensor