If Plants Could Talk... // Maddy Harrison & Ben Schiffler

Once we had the sensors, we knew we had to test them in our final environment to make sure that they could work. And that meant choosing the plant, table, and housing that we would be using for our final table.

For our plant selection, we picked plants that were all indoor plants (so that they would need to be watered and have been bred to be indoors), were all from the same climate (so that they would all require the same amount of watering), and then plants that either needed to be watered very frequently or very infrequently so that a reminder would be necessary. For ease of building and space, we chose plants that needed to be watered infrequently, picking this group from desert climates.

We then made sure the plants would be able to survive; we drilled holes in the housing to allow drainage, we layered the base of the housing with rocks, and then filled it with well-draining cactus soil.  As we did this, we hooked up our sensors to the plants, to make sure that we could get early readings and see if they corresponded with our results from our early tests, which they did!

With our sensors all hooked up, our plants all perfectly potted, and our readings reporting accurately, the first stage of hardware was complete. Next, we are onto the Raspberry Pi connection, and hacking a table into being able to store our plant and shield our sensors/electronics.