FLORA

14 Articles

2022 Hackaday Prize: Plant Monitoring System Grows To Include LoRa

August 23, 2022 by 7 Comments

Change on industrial scales is slow, but if you’re operating your own small farm or simply working in a home garden there are some excellent ways to use water more effectively. The latest tool from [YJ] makes it possible to use much less water while still keeping plant yields high.

This is an improvement on a previous project which automates watering and lighting of a small area or single pot. This latest creation, called FLORA, includes a LoRa module for communication up to 3 kilometers, and the ESP32 on board also handles monitoring of soil moisture, humidity and other sensors. It also includes a pump driver for managing irrigation systems so that smart decisions can be made about when to water. Using this device, the water usage when testing was reduced by around 30% compared to a typical timed irrigation system.

Using a smart system like this is effective for basically any supply of water, but for those who get water from something like an off-grid rainwater system or an expensive water utility, the gains are immediate. If you aren’t already growing your own food to take advantage of tools like this, take a look at this primer to get you started.

The HackadayPrize2022 is Sponsored by:

Approaching The Drop Location: Seeds Away!

September 4, 2020 by 8 Comments

Arbor Day is a holiday many countries dedicate to planting trees, but with the steady encroachment of climate change, we need to maximize our time. Dronecoria doesn’t just plant a tree; it sows “hectares in minutes.” A hectare is 10,000 square meters or 2.471 acres. These aren’t the drones you’re looking for if you intend a weekend of gardening, this is in the scope of repopulating a forest with trees or reinvigorating a park with wildflowers. The seed balls in the hopper are 10kg of native seeds coupled with beneficial microorganisms to help the chances of each drop.

The drone’s body is laser cut from what looks like baltic birch plywood. The vector files are available in Illustrator (.ai) and CAD (.dxf) formats released under Creative Commons BY-SA, so give credit if you redistribute or remix it. In the 3D realm, you’ll need a SeedShutter and SeedDisperser, and both models are available in STL format.

We have other non-traditional seed spreading methods like canons, but it is a big job, and if you’ve build something to pitch in, drop us a tip!

The HackadayPrize2020 is Sponsored by:
Supplyframe
Digi-Key
Microchip
Arm

Go Big Or Go Home: A Tablecloth Touchpad

May 23, 2017 by 10 Comments

Phone screens keep getting bigger. Computer screens keep getting bigger. Why not a large trackpad to use as a mouse? [MaddyMaxey] had that thought and with a few components and some sewing skills created a trackpad in a tablecloth.

The electronics in this project are right off the shelf. A Flora board for the brains and 4 capacitive touch boards. If you haven’t seen the Flora, it is a circular-shaped Arduino made for sewing into things. The real interesting part is the construction. If you haven’t worked with conductive fabric and thread, this will be a real eye-opener. [Maddy’s] blog has a lot of information about her explorations into merging fabric and electronics and also covers things like selecting conductive thread.

As an optional feature, [MaddyMaxey] added vibration motors that provide haptic feedback to her touchpad. We were hoping for a video, but there doesn’t seem to be one. The code is just the example program for the capacitive sensor boards, although you can see in a screenshot the additions for the haptic motors.

We’ve covered the Flora before, by the way. You could also make a ridiculously large touch surface using tomography, although the resolution isn’t quite good enough for mouse purposes.

Ski Buddy Jacket Uses Arduino To Teach Youngsters To Ski

February 22, 2016 by 2 Comments

Snow skiing looks easy, right? You just stay standing, and gravity does the work. The reality is that skiing is difficult for beginners to learn. [19mkarpawich] loves to ski, but he was frustrated seeing crying kids on skis along with screaming parents trying to coach them. Inspired by wearable electronics, he took an Arduino, an old jacket, some LEDs, and created Ski Buddy.

Continue reading “Ski Buddy Jacket Uses Arduino To Teach Youngsters To Ski” →

Warm Up Your Small Talk With A Thermometer Scarf

January 10, 2016 by 7 Comments

Just how cold is it out there? This giant thermometer scarf is a fantastic entry-level wearables project. It’s sure to strike up conversations that move past the topic of weather.

The scarf is built around a FLORA, a Neopixel ring that represents the bulb, and a short length of Neopixels to show the temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius. Temperature sensing is done with a poorly documented DHT11 that gave [caitlinsdad] the fits until he found Adafruit’s library for them.To make the scarf, [caitlinsdad] used a nice cozy micro-fleece. He built a pocket for the electronics and padded it with polyester fiber fill to diffuse the LEDs. This makes the lights blur and run together, resembling a mercury thermometer.

Once it was up and running, [caitlinsdad] figured out the temperature scale based on the DHT11 readings and marked it out on the scarf with a permanent marker. [caitlinsdad] has a few mods in mind for this project. For instance, it would be easy to add haptic feedback to keep you from being exposed for too long. Another wearable in the same spirit is this hat that has a sunblock reminder system.

Continue reading “Warm Up Your Small Talk With A Thermometer Scarf” →

Break Your Wrist? Twitter-Enable That Plaster Cast

December 31, 2015 by 1 Comment

Plaster casts are blank canvases for friends and family to post their get well messages. But if it’s holiday season, adding blinky LED lights to them is called for. When [Dr Lucy Rogers] hurt her hand, she put a twitter enabled LED Christmas tree on her cast.

The hardware is plain simple – some RGB LEDs, an Arduino, a blue tooth module and a battery. The LEDs and wires formed the tree, and all the parts were attached to the plaster cast using Velcro. This allowed the electronics to be removed during future X-ray scans. The fun part was in connecting the LEDs to the #CheerLights project. CheerLights is an “Internet of Things” project that allows people’s lights all across the world to synchronize to one color set by a Tweet. To program the Arduino, she used code written by [James Macfarlane] which allowed the LED color to be set to any Cheerlights color seen in blue tooth UART data.

Connectivity is coordinated using MQTT — lightweight standard popular with connected devices. By connecting the MQTT feed to the cheerlights topic from [Andy Stanford-Clark’s] MQTT feed (mqtt://iot.eclipse.org with the topic cheerlights) the lights respond to tweets (Tweet #cheerlights and a color). The LED colors can also be selected via the phone from the color picker tool in the controller, or directly via the UART. If the Bluetooth connection is lost, the LEDs change colors randomly. Obviously, delegates had great fun when she brought her Twitter enabled LED blinky lights plaster cast arm to a conference. It’s not as fun unless you share your accomplishments with others!