For this assignment we could do anything we wanted using plants and technology.
Everyone knows that plants like to be spoken to. After all, when we speak we breathe out C02 (which plants breathe in). But did you know that plants have a language of their own? According to an article in The Daily Mail, “New research suggests plants not only respond to sound but communicate with each other with ‘clicking’ noises.”
What might a plant say to a human? I imagine that their responses would be colored by however they were feeling at the moment. With this in mind, I created a contraption that would allow a house plant to communicate based on input from various sensors that detect temperature and humidity. If the plant were in optimal conditions, it would say something pleasant. If not, it would say something negative.
I experimented with other sensors as well: a vibration sensor that detect whether a plant was touched, a proximity sensor that would detect when you were near the plant, and a wind sensor that would detect whether you were speaking. The current iteration of this project uses a humidity/temperature sensor, a microphone (to detect when you are speaking), and an LCD screen that prints the plant’s response.