The Living Plant

Overview

In this case scenario we demonstrate how a plant can interact with existing voice assistants such as Siri or Alexa to trigger reminders like the water tank level or play sounds while watered.

While sensors are constantly measured and stored, data science can be introduced for discovering the impact of air quality improvement in your house and how light, temperature or humidity can affect this.

The Living Plant

Originated from amazonian jungle, this living houseplant that really purifies the air, so it is a true eye-catcher in every interior that also makes a contribution to a better and healthier indoor climate.

Calathea is an amazing decorative plant that it closes its leaves at night and opens them again in the morning!

What we know as input parameters is that it prefers a semi-shaded spot at a temperature of between 16 and 27 °C.

Sensors

• Soil humidity sensor lower that 30% will trigger the watering system with relay and 12V water pump.
• Air temperature and humidity from room will be measured by DHT11
• Light and UV Adafruit VEML6075 for solar checking (eventually this could also extend the architecture with more shade with curtain and motor)
• Air quality for measuring any difference into environment conditions

Hardware Board

Really loved the Spresense board because of multimedia capabilities and compatibility with Arduino IDE therefore more applications can be easily built. Still found libraries bit early stage and had some issues on error handling.

Not having too much previous experience with audio processing was a bit challenging, wanted to attach also microphone for voice commands, this could be some functionality for future upgrades.

Connectivity

Putting all things together was a real delight and the board offer quite good description on where to connect and works as expected. You can find all connection on attached files

Tried several ways to add these components for to work together and first 'release' was similar to the one bellow with all glued around the plant.

Instead of using a box, we attached this at the back of a canvas for having more space and improve this system in the future.

.. and front-side might look like this also the bird was also drawn to fit into the jungle context :)

Interaction

Amazonian jungle atmosphere is reminder for the original environment of the living plant. If the water pump is triggered and humidity of the soil is not changing for specific time we consider that there is 'no water left in the water tank' and therefore 'ask Siri to create reminder with 'filling the water tank or order nutrients' as well.

When soil humidity is under 30% then we start the water pump and keep constant humidity into the soil.

Data Storage

DasData has a simple way to store any historical sensors data and get some basic data visualisation also with possibility to verify anytime data entries.

You can see live data stream at DasData - Living Plant Data Storage

Data Science

You can import this data into Jupyter Notebook and start with data science experiment to discover trends or analyse other correlations in between data from sensors

You can find full notebook sample code in GitHub.

Conclusion

Thank you Sony for device, must say I found this board quite fun to learn new things and put all these together.