Botanicalls plants now can check on each other before making phone calls–part of my Sociable Objects thesis that explores using local sources to drive better-informed behaviors. Here’s the scenario:
Fiddle-leaf fig is low on light. Its light level for the last two days is only 30% of optimal and its Botanicalls event sensor is triggered. But is it time to make a phone call? As a Sociable Object device, its decisions don’t need to rely on single data points. The fig begins making contact with the Botanicalls plants around it. If they haven’t gotten enough light either recently, the call for help will be postponed because it’s probably been cloudy and that’s not a reason to disturb humans with a useless phone call. However in this case the spider plant, cuban oregano and prayer plant all respond that their light levels are close to optimal. So it’s not cloudy and Fiddle-leaf fig places a call for help.
Next steps will be checking the solar panel on ITP’s roof, the broadcast time clock and at least one interactive project so that the plant can double-check on sun, know it’s daytime, and detect that someone is around to answer its calls.
The XBee time clock is back up and running on the ITP floor. It has been changed from a broadcast to a responder model. This is both more efficient generally, and faster in practice. The new PIC code for the clock is matched with new sample Arduino code that any project can incorporate to pick up accurate Eastern Standard/Daylight Time. This is the first of my series of Sociable Objects.
TECHNICAL INFO:
To get the time, set your XBee to:
- PAN ID: C
- Destination Low: 1
- My Address: 0
Then send “GET”. You’ll receive a time string is in the following format: *20061003143227 where the year is 2006, month is October, day is the 3rd, hour is 14 (2 p.m.), minute is 32 and second is 27.
The clock also broadcasts the time in human readable format once per minute to all addresses on PAN ID CC.
Every hour, the system grabs a time update from the National Institute of Standards, and adjusts itself accordingly so that its signal is always accurate.
At ITP on Thursday evenings, students teach students in hour-long sessions that we call DriveBys. My second one was about doing research at NYU, our affiliated libraries and myriad of online services. The presentation was primarily for second-year students embarking on their Masters Thesis. I got help from Matt Burton who pointed out a lot of great non-NYU online resources. For those who missed it, I have posted a PDF of the presentation, and a video of the entire session that was masterfully taped by Dan Phiffer.
