Plantenna: The Plant Antenna

October 20, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 37 Comments

The back story behind [Mike] experimenting with plants as AM radio transmission antennas antennae is rather interesting and worth the short read. But for those who just want the facts, [Mike] took an ATMega324, modified the PWM output into a sinusoidal AM signal (using a simple form of RLC circuitry), and connected the circuit to a plant no plants were harmed in the making of this project. The results? Well we’re not ones who would spoil the surprise, you’ll have to see for yourself in the video after the jump.

Continue reading “Plantenna: The Plant Antenna” →

Mushroom Terrarium Automation

June 24, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wexdNx_StRc]

Like many specialty plants, growing mushrooms requires that you keep a fine balance between humidity and temperature. this can be fairly tedious at times, so many opt for automated systems. [Anthony_p1234] has chosen to build his own. Using an Arduino, he controls power to two heating pads, a sonic humidifier, and an air pump to keep his mushrooms happy. He shares the process of building the system, testing and calibrating the parts and putting it all in use. We didn’t see any schematics, but he does describe everything fairly well. The source code is available for download.

Arduino Tux Plant Care

August 13, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 3 Comments

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]

Plants As Speakers

June 27, 2008 by Eliot 8 Comments

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]