• The plant with the speech bubble and the components inside

  • The plant responds to touch

  • Trouble shooting

  • The components: Two Arduino Unos, Touché shield, touch screen

Talking plant

In March 2013, I attended a workshop about capacitive sensing at Resonate 2013. The workshop was by Ivan Poupyrev from Disney Research and Jonas Loh from Studio NAND who worked on Botanicus Interacticus together showcasing Disney's Touché.
Sweet side effect: The participants got to keep the open source version of Touché - a shield for Arduino.
Of course I was thrilled to experiment with it. I thought it was interesting to stick with the topic of making plants react to touch, so I thought it would be interesting to give them a voice:
A physical speech bubble is attached to the plant and when you touch it, it talks to you. Inside the speech bubble, there are two Arduinos - one featuring the Touché shield and the other one is running the screen. From the Touché shield, a sensor cable is attached to the soil of the plant.



I wanted to make the speech bubble completely self-contained - so that you would just take it and attach it to any plant. But unfortunately, it wouldn't work reliably on batteries, so I had to have the two Arduinos inside the speech bubble hooked up to a computer for power supply.

Category free time project

Year 2013