Arduino Tux plant care

posted Aug 13th 2008 11:30am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: arduino hacks, misc hacks


Some of us need a little help keeping our green leafy friends happy. The Arduino Tux (translated) plant care system was built to make things a little easier.

The author had a broken tux toy laying around and wanted to do something fun with it. He cut a hole in the front to mount an LED matrix and connected it all to an Arduino. A couple of metal rods serve as a resistivity sensor in the plant’s dirt.

When you water the plant, tux flashes some hearts and a smiley face. As the moisture drops, tux gets less happy with the end result being a big frown.

These are the same people who brought you the Arduino Photolab.

[via Hack a Day Flickr Pool]

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Plants as speakers

posted Jun 27th 2008 11:25pm by Eliot Phillips
filed under: home entertainment hacks

You can make pretty much anything a speaker by vibrating it. Japanese engineer, [Keiji Koga], has been working for many years to perfect his plant based sound transmission system. The voice coil is at the bottom of the plant container and transfers sound up the stalk to the leaves. It’s and interesting idea, but we can’t imagine it sounds much better than vibrating a rigid surface.

[via io9]

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