Hi, I’m Nick the creator of FlorA Plant Care. I’d like to introduce you to my invention, a device I call the Sprout Houseplant Tender.
I started building this device a few years ago, just for myself. I wanted something that would measure the local environment around my plants, send that data to the cloud so I could monitor it and automatically deliver water. I also wanted something that looked nice, not an ugly plastic gizmo.
It worked, as long as it didn’t get wet or you didn’t touch it or look at it too closely. So I created a PCB (printed circuit board) to keep it all together and at least you could touch it from time to time without the thing breaking down.
Then it worked really well. Then some friends said they wanted one… but it was much too finicky and technical to really share. One still had to know how much light an asparagus fern needed and how a reading of 9,500, for instance, translated to enough bright-indirect light for the day; or how 20 percent relative humidity was much too low for a fern that grows in a swamp.
I spent some time, OK a lot of time, messing around and figuring out how to get this to people.
I got what I’ll call version one in my hands and it was a very effective houseplant-automation device, but it was still pretty clunky. It was a pretty big, awkward device sticking out of the plant. And it was all plastic, ew. Users would still have to know a fair bit about their plants, but it sure saved me daily trips to my sunroom to water my most-needy houseplants!
So, I decided that to be really useful I had to do two things:
- Contain this gizmo in an all-in-one package and,
- Build an all-encompassing houseplant database.
No problem, right? I bought a CNC machine learned to use it, devised a hacky way to plug my existing PCB into a lid to test the concept, and spent hours pouring over botanical databases to pull together a database with specific-care guidance for more than 150 of the most-popular houseplants (OK, it’s not all-encompassing yet). Easy peasy.
Now, I’m working toward a proper first iteration ready for any houseplant owner to simply automate their plants. Below is a look at my first design, which is spitting out great data in my office and nurturing a big, bushy calethea.
To build this market-ready version, I’ve enlisted a great software engineer named John, a great electrical engineer named Jeff and we’re taking this thing to Kickstarter very soon.
If you want to keep up with the project, help push us over the finish line, or just have a penchant for filling out boxes, sign up below.