The Twittering-plant Botanicalls project has undergone a revamp, with very nice new kits. These are still Arduino-based but are now pared down to a single green-leafed PCB. The best part of the new design is that the XPort modules and microcontrollers are preprogrammed with the code for a unique Twitter account. That means you can just plug it in and its ready to go, a lot easier than the last rev which required a bit of hacking to work. The kits are also priced 1/3 less. Its cool to see the project get better & better…so I snagged a couple and they’re in the Adafruit shop now!
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Hello,
why are all the wireless kits so expensive? Both Bluetooth and ZigBee costs under $3 [1], Atmel has quite cheap IEEE 802.15.4 radios now. Is it possible to build something like Arduino, but under $10 [2] and with ZigBee radio included? For wireless sensor network prototyping board?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee
[2] Ideally, it would cost under $1 because one needs a lot of them. I understand we are not there yet. But why not? Because no one wants millions of motes?
it costs $3 if you’re building 100,000. xbee modules go for about $20/ea on the retail market. if you need two that means the kit would cost $100 more after all the markups!
It would be really cool if such kit used bluetooth or other wireless module, so it won’t require to wire all the plants around the house. 🙂
The original version did! But it was much too expensive for a DIY kit. Plus lots of geeks can use this in the office 🙂
Hello,
why are all the wireless kits so expensive? Both Bluetooth and ZigBee costs under $3 [1], Atmel has quite cheap IEEE 802.15.4 radios now. Is it possible to build something like Arduino, but under $10 [2] and with ZigBee radio included? For wireless sensor network prototyping board?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee
[2] Ideally, it would cost under $1 because one needs a lot of them. I understand we are not there yet. But why not? Because no one wants millions of motes?
it costs $3 if you’re building 100,000. xbee modules go for about $20/ea on the retail market. if you need two that means the kit would cost $100 more after all the markups!