PlantOS

Inspiration

I wanted to do something regarding IoT and how we can connect our homes into the cloud. So I came up with the idea of solving the problem of our plants dying because we forget to irrigate them. This is a fairly simple problem with the power of the cloud to be able to connect your plants to you wherever you are.

What it does

The hack uses an arduino connected to a moisture sensor. The sensor talks to the serial ports on the laptop which are processed using Processing, which launches a .bat file that calls a web protocol on the bluemix cloud. The cloud then calls twilio to send a text message to the person.

How we built it

We intially built the circuit witht he sensor. THen proceeded to program the bluemix cloud using node.js and hooking up twilio to it. Then we connected the arduino to the cloud using Processing and the .bat file.

Challenges we ran into

We couldn't connect our original device (a spark core) to the wireless, so insteda of the device talkign directly to the cloud, and doing the processing in the cloud, we had to improvise to make the connection. Ultiamately, if we could have done all the processing in the cloud we could have worked to implement more APIs such as the Accuweather.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Serial Port Communication was tricky but fun once it got to work.

What we learned

We learned how to use Node.js, Processing and the bluemix cloud.

What's next for PlantOS

We might expand capabilities for the device to connect directly to bluemix, as well as put additional APIs such as the Accuweather to make out hack better.

Built With

• arduino
• bluemix
• node.js
• processing
• twilio