The next PlayStation trophy you earn could provide more than just bragging rights. Sony has launched a "Play and Plant" program that will plant a tree when you earn a trophy in Horizon Forbidden West. Complete "Reached the Daunt" by March 25th and Sony will team with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant a tree as part of reforestation efforts in California, Florida and Wisconsin. You can save the real Earth while you save the virtual one, to put it another way.

The project won't please every environmentalist. Sony and the Arbor Day Foundation will halt donations when they reach the estimated 288,000 trees needed to complete the reforestation efforts. Given that Horizon Forbidden West is Sony's tentpole game for early 2022, the company could hit that milestone very quickly. Wouldn't it be kinder to the planet (and latecomers) to plant as many trees as possible?

Still, the plant-a-tree program represents a unique tie-in, and an experiment in pairing in-game achievements with real-world outcomes. You now have a material incentive to make progress. We wouldn't expect initiatives like this to become commonplace, but it's easy to see more of them in the future — if just to keep people engrossed in a game beyond its first few hours.

There are usually two ways to go about any task: the easy way and the hard way. Sometimes we might not know there are two options, but once we see someone else’s solution we might feel differently. When running a greenhouse or small farm, for example, we might decide to set up dozens of sensors to measure temperature, humidity, soil moisture, dew point, sunlight, or any number of other variables. That’s the hard way. The easy way is to use the Arduino-powered Norman climate simulator from [934Virginia].

Rather than relying on an array of sensors, any of which could fail or provide erroneous data for any number of reasons, Norman relies on a simple input of data about the current location – target coordinates, specified date ranges, and minimum/maximum values for temperature and humidity – in order to learn and predict the weather conditions in that location. It makes extensive use of the Dusk2Dawn library, and models other atmospheric conditions using mathematical modeling methods in order to make relatively accurate estimates of the climate it is installed in. There are some simulations on the project’s Plotly page which show its successes as well.

Presumably anyone using this device could run a greenhouse relatively well on only $10 worth of electronics rather than relying on a suite of sensors and input data, which is helpful for anyone strapped for cash (especially in developing areas of the world). The project is named after Norman Borlaug, a famous soil scientist and someone worth reading about. The first (and possibly only) sensor we might want to add to this project is a soil moisture sensor, since yearly estimates won’t tell us whether it has just rained or not.

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I talk to my plants. Maybe I’m crazy, but I suspect that many of you do this too. In this project, you may be able to give your plants the ability to emote back just a little bit. A.P.E.X. is basically just a moisture sensor with some emojis as a […]

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The post Give Your Plants Some Emotion With A.P.E.X. appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Growing your own food is a fun hobby and generally as rewarding as people say it is. However, it does have its quirks and it definitely equires quite the time input. That’s why it was so satisfying to watch Farmbot push a weed underground. Take that!

Farmbot is a project that has been going on for a few years now, it was a semifinalist in the Hackaday Prize 2014, and that development time shows in the project documented on their website. The robot can plant, water, analyze, and weed a garden filled with arbitrarily chosen plant life. It’s low power and low maintenance. On top of that, every single bit is documented on their website. It’s really well done and thorough. They are gearing up to sell kits, but if you want it now; just do it yourself.

The bot itself is exactly what you’d expect if you were to pick out the cheapest most accessible way to build a robot: aluminum extrusions, plate metal, and 3D printer parts make up the frame. The brain is a Raspberry Pi hooked to its regular companion, an Arduino. On top of all this is a fairly comprehensive software stack.

The user can lay out the garden graphically. They can get as macro or micro as they’d like about the routines the robot uses. The robot will happily come to life in intervals and manage a garden. They hope that by selling kits they’ll interest a whole slew of hackers who can contribute back to the problem of small scale robotic farming.

The FarmBot team has been pretty busy with their CNC Farming and Gathering machine. The idea is to automate the farming process with precise deployment of tools: plows, seed injection, watering, sensors, etc. An Arduino with an added RAMPS handles the movement, and a Raspi provides internet connectivity. Their prototype has already experienced four major iterations: the first revision addressed bigger issues such as frame/track stability and simplification of parts. Now they’re locking down the specifics on internet-of-things integration and coding for advanced movement functions.

The most recent upgrade provides a significant improvement by overhauling the implementation of the tools. Originally, the team envisioned a single, multi-function tool head design that carried everything around all the time. Problem is, the tool that’s in-use probably works best if it’s lower than the others, and piling them all onto one piece spells trouble. The solution? a universal tool mounting system, of course. You can see them testing their design in a video after the break.

If the FarmBot progress isn’t impressive enough—and admittedly we’d have called project lead [Rory Aronson] crazy for attempting to pull this off…but he did it—the FarmBot crew started and successfully funded an entire sub-project through Kickstarter. OpenFarm is an open-source database set to become the go-to wiki for all things farming and gardening. It’s the result of [Rory] encountering an overwhelming amount of generic, poorly written advice on plant growing, so he just crowdsourced a solution. You know, no sweat.

The project featured in this post is a semifinalist in The Hackaday Prize.

It’s great having fresh vegetables just a few steps away from the kitchen, but it takes work to keep those plants healthy. [Pierre] found this out the hard way after returning from vacation to find his tomato plant withering away. He decided to put an end to this problem by building his own solar-powered plant watering system (page in French, Google translation).

An Arduino serves as the brain of the system. It’s programmed to check a photo resistor every ten minutes. At 8:30PM, the Arduino will decide how much to water the plants based on the amount of sunlight it detected throughout the day. This allows the system to water the plants just the right amount. The watering is performed by triggering a 5V relay, which switches on a swimming pool pump.

[Pierre] obviously wanted a “green” green house, so he is powering the system using sunlight. A 55 watt solar panel recharges a 12V lead acid battery. The power from the battery is stepped down to the appropriate 5V required for the Arduino. Now [Pierre] can power his watering system from the very same energy source that his plants use to grow.

Arduino community on Gplus is pretty active and many people share their experiments, projects and prototypes to receive comments and tips. Yongho Jeong from Seul (South Korea) published a video called Uncanny, a breathing plant installation creating unusual sensations and made with Arduino Uno + air pump:

The uncanny (German: Das Unheimliche, “the opposite of what is familiar”) is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be both familiar yet alien at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.  //
The subject of this project is interaction between human and plant. My First thought is that Do plants breathe like we human do? I was amazed after learning that plants breathe and that their breathing is very similar to ours. So I want to show that plants breaths llike human do and reacting to touch of human.

Watch the plant in action below and explore Jeong blog  for the other technical details.

Primary image

This robot waters the plants while you're on holiday! You have to line up the plants and through a GUI in Microsoft Access you can input the water demands per plant (how many times per week the plant needs water and how much). The water reservoir contains a mixer and an aeration unit (through lego compressors) to avoid dead water. The only thing not lego about it is the water pump and the robot is controlled by an Arduino Duemilanove. I've used a selfmade multipurpose motor driver pcb so all the electronics visisble aren't used ;)

@JarroseLaPlante is an installation created by Félicien Goguey and Thomas Meghe.

This plant has a twitter account, you can water it by direct tweets. Since a single tweet can’t save her, she needs twitter friends to grow up!

A Processing application listens to new tweets via Twitter APIs.  A servo motor is bringing water to the plant while sensor checks its the humidity rate (if it’s too low the plant tweets in order to alert her followers).

If you follow the plant’s account,  she can send you private messages.

Go here to visit the plant. And do not forget to water it!