Botanicalls: The Plants Have Your Number
The Phone

The Sensors and Network

A soil moisture sensor in each plant sends information to an Arduino board which then passes the information to a ZigBee network. An XPort is used to send data via PHP to a mySQL database and to Asterisk, which drives the phone calls.

The code on the chip averages the data and makes decisions about when a phone call request should be sent. There are set thresholds, unique to each plant, for minimum and maximum soil moisture.

The moisture sensor circuit is based on Forrest Mims. Read more on Rob Faludi’s blog.

Learn more about how the phone calls are placed