A community outsourced decision making project in which, the internet public feeds a plant, predicted outcome was either gluttonous overfeeding or a an abandonment from the collective internets.
The goal of the project was in under 2 weeks build a website with the necessary back end work to allow for the users decisions and actions to be partaken in realtime.
obtaining an domain name:
this was simple but we spent a decent chunk of time to get the right url. from going from lame things like "feedthisplant.com"
we then found the .me top level domain, and tried a few different combos when I suggested we should have incorrect sentence structure 'like Yoda' suggesting thirstyis.me was free then Zak tried hungryis.me and then purchased the domain. the website was hosted on a server in the U.S.
Zak and I spent a couple of evenings working out the aesthetic we anted for the website, the websites in the early stages we had the idea of having a cartoony daisy to introduce the plant and make it more relatable, it was mooted drafted but abandoned for the final implementation. along with it the idea of using a pastel colour palette. A theme of green and brown became prevalent with earthy tones.
i painted up icons and titles with a scratchy line appearance. these were then run through illustrator to simplify them.
Zak wrote all the html, css and php for the website and wrote a curl script (basically acts like a user for example can go and fill out the comment section on a webpage when run) for interacting with the arduino,
Luke found a streaming site called you stream where you can embed the player and your stream on you r page. this helped simplify the the process of streaming and reducing the impact on our home data capped internet connection.
Hardware:
Arduino + WiFly shield.
printer servo powered pump.
the notable difficulty: with this project was getting the networking going, AUT's network policies made it too prohibitive to do at Uni, so the project had to be relocated to a residential address
arduino + wifi shield
I had used arduino frequently on previous projects but this time we were introducing 2 new variables: wifi and connecting to a user to the unit through global ip, as of yet the arduino doesn't have a native plugin library for wifi so we had to find a sample sketch to get us to interface with it. the Spark fun Wifly shield has a SPI_UART chip onboard that does the interfacing between the the wifi and the arduino. reducing it down to only requiring 4 digital out pins. being a reasonably new product finding information about it is sparse, luckily it had a example project on the spark-fun, which I had to reverse engineer. the program would connect to the network and then wait for another machine to ping it, then it would send up a html webpage, and the user returned data into the fields and it would close the connection.
this was the most consuming part of the project but also the most interesting/frustrating, by the time i finally worked out a way of getting it to work. i had to stop due to it being 4 hours after our estimated launch In the end we had to resort to plan b (laptop ripping the rss and interpreting)
The physical structure was built on a 22 gallon bin, the benefit was it was lightproof, waterproof, and cheap. on the lid we cut a hole for the camera. the pump was mounted on a bracket and the pumps leads went to six holes in the lid, a led camping light was modified so we could trigger it. we re used the relays from the camera box project to trigger the higher voltage of the pump and light by running the arduino's corresponding pin high. in the base potting mix was added and 4 different pot plants added.
