![The future of healthy indoor plants, courtesy of AI. (Credit: [Liam])](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/plantmom_test_setup_with_plant.jpg)
Since LLMs (so far) don’t come with physical appendages by default, some hardware had to be plugged together to measure parameters like light, temperature and soil moisture. Add to this a grow light & a water pump and all that remained was to tell the LMM using an extensive prompt (containing Python code) what it should do (keep the plant alive) and what responses (Python methods) are available. All that was left now was to let the ‘AI’ (Google’s Gemma 3) handle it.
To say that this resulted in a dramatic failure along with what reads like an emotional breakdown (on the side of the LLM) would be an understatement. The LLM insisted on turning the grow light on when it should be off and had the most erratic watering responses imaginable based on absolutely incorrect interpretations of the ADC data (flipping dry vs wet). After this episode the poor chili plant’s soil was absolutely saturated and is still trying to dry out, while the ongoing LLM experiment (with empty water tank) has the grow light blasting more often than a weed farm.
So far it seems like that the humble state machine’s job is still safe from being taken over by ‘AI’, and not even brown thumb folk can kill plants this efficiently.
It was a practice run. Next, humans.
LMM: Large Moisture Model?
Making holes in plastic. No, really don’t use a knife – a knife is a bad idea.
What works for me is either using a hot pointy bit (hot metal skewer or the soldering iron) or a wood drill bit (I think people call these brad point bits) with not much pressure otherwise the plastic might crack.
Use a wood scrap behind the plastic while drilling – even better: one before, and clamp the three layers wood-plastic-wood together.
Keep this experiment away from Ars Technica. I can hear the “I told you so” all the way over here.
Multiple inverted sensors sounds like user error..