The New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program Botanicalls group have been working on a project that allows your plants to talk to you over Twitter. Botanicall’s Twitter hack answers the question: “How is your plant doing?”. The main pieces of technology used are a Blackberry and assorted bits of Arduino boards – the wires detect the moisture levels in the plant’s soil, and when it drops to a pre-determined level, it will fire off a tweet and let you know what’s going on. So in theory you should always know when to water your plants – can’t really get any easier for you than that!
The great thing about this project is that the general principals involved could be applied in loads of ways. Whenever someone gets too close to my car, I could have it tweet my friends list. I could create a contraption that hangs from my cat’s collar and tweets me when it detects that there’s no more water left in the dish. Leave a comment and let us know what Twitter contraption you would find useful…