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I'm Talking to You: Technological gizmo allows your houseplant to get in touch
Baltimore Sun Photo
Botanicalls is a sensor that allows plants to contact their owners by text messages on the online social network Twitter.
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Published: February 26, 2009
If your plants could talk, they might ask for a drink.
And thanks to the Botanicalls project, they can.
Botanicalls is a sensor that allows plants to contact their owners by text messages on the online social network Twitter, providing gentle reminders when they need watering.
The sensor is part of a do-it-yourself kit sold through a few tech-friendly Web sites such as ThinkGeek.com and MakerShed.com. It costs $99. It requires some assembly and a solder ing iron to set up the leaf-shaped circuit board and sensor.
The Botanicalls Web site describes it as "a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species understanding."
"Water me, please," it might ask one day. A few days later there is a more panicky "URGENT! Water me!"
Do what the plant says, and it will reply with a polite "Thank you for watering me!"
"We've made a lot of precautions to make sure that it wasn't too annoying or needy," said Kate Hartman, an adjunct faculty member at New York University's interactive telecommunications program. She is one of the founders of Botanicalls. "The plant doesn't call you to remind you every single day. It's selective, no ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf' scenario.
"We were not sure people would like it, but they tend to think of it as really charming."
About 100 of the sensors have been sold so far.
"Obviously, it could develop as a commercial product, but right now it's for the DIY community. It's more niche," Hartman said. "We started out doing it in this form to see how it feels, what the interest is like."
But she thinks that people should enjoy being able to assemble it themselves. "It's a way of getting to know the way things work," she said. "We like the idea of people getting to know how their devices work, and it's a fun, educational tool, too. You can get people thinking about sensors and communication systems and all that."
The idea for Botanicalls came about in 2005.
"The group created the project when we were students in the graduate school," Hartman said. The laboratory environment, she said, was "tech-centric and we wanted to bring in some greenery." But they knew that their peers frequently brought in plants and then got so caught up in their work that they let them wither and die. Their solution, which turned into a class project, was to create a sensor that would detect the moisture level of the soil and alert them when it needed more water or when it had been over-watered.
The first version of Botanicalls, which they developed in 2006, called people on their telephones to let them know their plants were parched. The latest version, released last year, relies on "Tweets," short messages sent on the Twitter social network.
"I have to say that the plants were my introduction to Twitter," Hartman said.
She isn't sure what the future holds for Botanicalls. "It's open-source, so our hardware and software plans are online so people can modify it as they like," she said. "Right now, we're kind of in a wait-and-see mode. We're seeing what's happening, what people are using it for."
Rob Faludi, another of the co-creators of Botanicalls, said that peoples' response so far "has been great."
"It creates a sense of connection to another living thing, an increasingly rare technological feat in a world where automated e-mails and commercialized social networking pass for organic interaction," he said in an e-mail interview. "Most importantly, Botanicalls keeps plants alive."
Paul Dorsett, the assistant nursery manager at L.A. Reynolds Garden Showcase, said he sells some moisture sensors that people can stick in the soil, but nothing as elaborate as Botanicalls.
"Most of the time, I just tell people to stick their finger in the soil and see how moist it is," he said. "But I'm sure there's probably a number of computer geeks that would love that sort of thing."
So why not just make a note to water your plants?
"That's absolutely an option," Hartman said with a laugh.
More information, including schematics and a Flickr.com feed showing the device in use, can be found at www.botanicalls.com.
■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.
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