Rocketboom featured Botanicalls today as part of their overview of the ITP Winter Show. We were also pleased to hear from the ITP faculty that Botanicalls could continue to be installed at ITP for the next six months so the system can be developed further.
It was a terrific show with a large and appreciative crowd. The four Bontanicalls team members, Rebecca Bray, Kate Hartman and Kati London and myself, were helped by the comments and suggestions of our classmates and instructors in the Sustainability, Project Development Studio, Network Objects and Network Effects classes at ITP.
The Botanicalls project made its debut at the ITP Winter Show on December 17th. Botanicalls allows thirsty plants to place phone calls for human help. Rather than driving a wedge between people and nature, the project uses technology to bring people into closer relationships with their natural environment. Humans can also phone the plants to learn about their origins and characteristics, including how they like to be cared for. You can call the plants right now at +1-212-202-8348.
Each plant has its own voice and will report when it needs water, if it has been over-watered or under-watered or if it is getting too much or to little light. Plants will also call back with thank-you messages when they’ve been properly cared for.
The Botanicalls web site contains a complete system diagram, including a description of the networking and call-processing system that is used.
I’m working on a physical clock that also broadcasts time to the entire ITP floor via XBee ZigBee radio. The time signal can be picked up by any project on the floor that incorporates ZigBee, and used for anything from clock display to inter-project synchronization. The code is being written in PIC Basic Pro. At some point it may incorporate updates from NISTservers.
To pick up the signal at ITP, simply set the PAN address on your XBee to C or CC (the c is for clock). The signal is simultaneously broadcast to all 65,534 addresses within that network. PAN C is in a human-friendly format and PAN CC is formatted to be easily machine-readable.
This project interests me because it begins to explore how an object can share information on a network with other objects, creating a landscape of content from which other objects and people can benefit.
At ITP on Thursday evenings, students teach students in hour-long sessions that we call DriveBys, because a lot of knowledge gets sprayed into the crowd in a short period of time. I just did one on the XBee ZigBee radios, covering the basics of applications, comparisons to other technologies, how to make one, advanced projects and some configuration in-depth. Here’s the XBee DriveBy presentation as a PDF. There is also a streaming video of the session available now, thanks to Dan Phiffer.
For Project Development Studio I’m working with Kate, Rebecca and Kati on a project to create an interaction network between live plants and people. Here’s our ITPlant notes.
