Collaborate Disseminate
Hydroponic systems are an increasingly popular way to grow plants indoors using a minimum of resources. Even some commercial farming operations are coming online using hydroponic growing techniques, as these …read more Continue reading A Single-Watt Hydroponic Lighting System
In a straight fight between a houseplant and a human, you might expect the plant to be at a significant disadvantage. So [David Bowen] has decided to even the odds …read more Continue reading (Mostly) Harmless Houseplant Wields Machete
Caring for a few plants, or even an entire farm, can be quite a rewarding experience. Watching something grow under and then (optionally) produce food is a great hobby or …read more Continue reading All-In-One Automated Plant Care
There’s been a movement in architecture over the past couple of decades to help tie together large urban developments with plant life and greenery. We’ve seen a few buildings, and …read more Continue reading Green Roofs Could Help Improve Solar Panel Efficiency
While the impulse to solving problems in complex systems is often to grab a microcontroller and some sensors to automate the problem away, interfacing with the real world is often …read more Continue reading Occam’s Razor: Gardening Edition
For all but the most experienced gardeners and botanists, taking care of the soil around one’s plants can seem like an unsolvable mystery. Not only does soil need the correct …read more Continue reading Fertilizing Plants With A Custom 3D-Printed Pump
Join us on Wednesday, January 13th at noon Pacific for the Plant Communication Hack Chat with Lex Kravitz!
As far as conversation goes, plants are usually a pretty poor choice of partners. Sure, we’ve all heard that talking to you houseplants is supposed to be good for them, but expecting …read more
Science fiction movies often portray horticulture in the future, be it terrestrial or aboard spacecraft, with hydroponic gardens overflowing with leafy greens and brightly colored fruit. There is no soil, just clear water that hints at future-people creating a utopia of plant strains untethered from their earthly roots.
This star-faring …read more
It is said that you’re not a sysadmin if you haven’t warmed up a sandwich on server. OK, it’s not widely said; we made it up, and only said it once, coincidentally enough after heating up a sandwich on a server. But we stand by the central thesis: never let …read more
Continue reading Turn Folds Into Flowers, But Not With Origami
Some plants react quickly enough for our senses to notice, such as a Venus flytrap or mimosa pudica. Most of the time, we need time-lapse photography at a minimum to notice while more exotic sensors can measure things like microscopic pores opening and closing. As with any sensor reading, those measurements can be turned into action through a little trick we call automation. [Harpreet Sareen] and [Pattie Maes] at MIT brought these two ideas together in a way which we haven’t seen before where a plant has taken the driver’s seat in a project called Elowan. Details are sparse but …read more