Overview

IoP is an Internet of Things project that enables plants to tweet their own care needs on Twitter, building an interactive relationship between plants and their caregivers. My teammates and I built it for Makeathon, an annual hackathon at NC State University.

Ideas

Tweeting plants tell you when and what they need, keeping gardening efficient and engaging. Inspired by the Open Algo project from MIT Media Lab, we noticed that maintaining plants at universities is expensive and often neglected. We wanted to bring plants online — giving caregivers a tangible, interactive reason to engage with them.

Implementations

As a demo, we picked one potted plant and connected it to a moisture level sensor. The sensor was connected to a virtual server that sent its readings to the cloud. The readings triggered different pre-made tweets to update people on the status of the plants. The followers were the actuators that responded to the tweets.

Reflections

I learned the importance of diversity through this project. We were a team of four with different majors, skillsets, and personalities — and that breadth was exactly what made it work. Read our story: Internet of Plants: Students Win with Social Media.