CS.42 – Green Thumb Trainer

• Michal Grawender
• Conrado Manzano
• Tam Rice

Our project is a simple one, we want to help people keep their plants alive. Many people buy plants and think that they are terrible at keeping them alive. In reality, people who are naturally good at taking care of plants have good care habits and ensure that the plant gets enough water and sunlight. Our device takes an approach to train these good habits and eliminate guess work in plant care. Then you can switch our device to a new plant type you can try to take care of and build habits for the new plant as well! As a whole system our device will have 3 key Arduinos. One is a “user information” Arduino. This is the place where users will enter information about their plant. Another is a “weekly update” Arduino. This arduino will be in charge of giving users a weekly update of how the plant has been doing. This will be done physically and also digitally via email and SMS. Finally, the final arduino will be the actual “plant monitoring” Arduino. This device will measure sunlight and soil moisture in order to inform the user of how well the plant is doing. This will also directly show you for the day when the plant has received enough light and if the plant needs to be watered. When these parts are joined together. A user can learn and build habits and observational skills to keep their plant alive! For example, let’s say a user eventually notices they water a plant every Monday. Then the user builds the habit of watering every Monday and no longer needs the reminder. A good analogy would be to describe our device as plant “training wheels.” You practice taking care of a plant with “training wheels” then once you get good and comfortable you can move your “training wheels” onto another houseplant or store the device until it is needed again. Now the purpose of the system as a whole is not to take the plant care out of house plant ownership; we instead strive to train people into creating good habits for plant care. People who don’t have the mythical green thumb often don’t realize that maybe the window the plant is at does not get enough sunlight, or they water a plant too often, etc. We seek to eliminate the guesswork out of plant care.