Automated Horticulture

Beth and I kill plants. It's what we do, what we've always done. In Colorado they fell to the cat. When we got to Georgia and left some potted plants outside, even with the rain and good sunshine they still wilted and proved our investment in them unwise.

When my grandmother died there were enough houseplants delivered to start a small nursery. I ended up with two of them, and we only water them when we notice that the leaves are pointing down. There's no other way we'll remember.

I got Vol. 8 of Make magazine (really cool, by the way) a few days ago and finally found something in it that 1. I could use, 2. I can afford to build, and 3. I have time to do. I shopped for and built the prototype today. I guess I could tell you what it does:

It automatically waters the houseplants every day. It's a simple system (mechanically, anyway) that displaces air in a bottle and forces water out, through tubes and on to the plants. The air is forced in to the bottle by an aquarium air pump and the pump itself is turned on and off with X10 controllers.

So the pump can be operated by a PC interface or by handheld remote. I haven't gotten to the PC interface yet; my CM17A X10 PC interface device crapped out and I'm waiting on another one to be delivered. I will then probably be using HeyU on Fedora Core 6 installed on my wonderful 8-year-old Compaq Presario 5155. It's my utility machine on one leg, but it does a fine job of running scheduled tasks. If there are any more advancements on this project, I'll be sure to post them.