The project

Project Idea: Swearing Plant

In our workshops, the focus is on experimenting with technology and learning the basics of electronics and programming. Since working on a project helps with understanding and learning, we want to implement the project of the swearing plant with you. This project involves both hardware and software. You will learn how to interface with sensors, connect hardware components, program the microcontroller, and troubleshoot errors.

The idea of the swearing plant comes from Nina, a Twitch streamer who has a very creative approach to technology and has already built many fun and clever projects with her community. You should definitely follow her on Instagram or Twitch.

So what exactly is this swearing plant? Don’t you sometimes wish the plant could directly communicate with you when it needs water, nutrients, or light? And since plants can’t speak, we want to give them a voice with the help of technology! Whether the plant curses, complains, or sings can still be decided, but the idea is that moisture in the plant pot will be measured using sensors, and then your selected sound will be played when you pass by the plant. So let’s get started!

Project Setup

So how exactly is this swearing plant going to work? How can we measure information about moisture or light and use it to inform us? And how does the plant know when it’s worth swearing? There are many ways to solve this problem, and here’s what we’ve come up with:

We will use a moisture sensor to measure the moisture in the plant pot and send this data to a computer running a program that decides whether to play a sound (DFPlayer + speaker) based on the values. And to ensure that the plant doesn’t swear all the time without anyone hearing it, we also want to use a motion sensor. This sensor will also send its data to the computer, where it will be processed in a way that the sound only plays when someone passes by the plant. So far, so planty 🤓. But wait a minute… Of course, it would be advantageous if we didn’t use a conventional, bulky laptop computer to process the data but had a much smaller one that we could almost invisibly place near the plant. And you guessed it, such a thing exists! These mini computers are called microcontrollers, and that’s what we want to use.

And that’s basically it. So we need one of these mini microcontrollers, a few sensors, and we need to connect everything with cables, power, and a program running on the microcontroller. Let’s get started!