Here at Andium we’re super excited to have finally moved into our new office space. We’ve been decking it out with walls covered in whiteboards, new shiny tech, and all the comforts of home. It especially started to feel like home when we placed a handful of these green leafy friends throughout the space!
Only we forgot to water them… within a week or so our leafy friends started to look like this…
Fail.
We’re an IoT company, we’re better than this. How come our plants aren’t internet connected! Hopefully before it’s too late for this little guy I put together a solution using our anduinoWiFi shield and IFTTT. Time to give our plants a voice!
Getting Started
If you’ve got a green thumb you’ve probably already stopped reading, but if you’re like me and need to give your plants the ability to digitally beg for mercy and scream for some water then you’re in the right place.
To give your plants a voice you’ll need an Arduino Due, or Zero, an anduinoWiFi shield, (or any other WiFi connected Arduino that can speak to Adafruit IO) and lastly a ‘Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor’. Oh, and a glass of water. (Give it to your plant when we’re done, they’ll thank you via e-mail now)
Here at Adafruit, we sell all of these amazing components, but we couldn’t find a good way to interact with them over the internet. There are certainly a lot of great services out there for datalogging, or communicating with your microcontroller over the web, but these services are either too complicated to get started, or they aren’t particularly fun to use. So, we decided to experiment with our own system, and that is how Adafruit IO got started.
To make it easy for people to get started using Arduino or ESP8266 we have starter packs with just about everything you may want to connect to the internet, with known-working WiFi modules! ESP8266 Huzzah Kit CC3000 Huzzah Kit
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Here at Adafruit, we sell all of these amazing components, but we couldn’t find a good way to interact with them over the internet. There are certainly a lot of great services out there for datalogging, or communicating with your microcontroller over the web, but these services are either too complicated to get started, or they aren’t particularly fun to use. So, we decided to experiment with our own system, and that is how Adafruit IO got started.