I love building stuff. Creating FlorA Plant Care has been a yearslong labor, self-learning, tutorials, soldering and setting a few things on fire. If I had a mantra for this process, it would be: move slow and break things.
It’s been a long project, but today, I have something I think is pretty special: a houseplant-care device that actually works for the average houseplant owner with no downtime, no bugs, and all added up, years of plant-care data to know it works really, really well.
How did I go from a daydream and a sad fern to a IoT device that actually makes it easier to autonomously care for plants?
There were three big things I had to figure out:
- The hardware
- The software
- Houseplant care database
Each were their own special headache, and took a lot of learning, iterations and mistakes to figure out. Each of these warrants their own post (or a full on book), but here’s a very abbreviated look at what it took.
Hardware is… hard
The old adage is hardware is hard, but today, it’s not really hard to build something for yourself. Getting it out to other people, however, gets tricky.
I started with a basic Arduino board, some breakout sensors (self contained little sensors designed for prototyping) and a bunch of tutorials on YouTube, Hackster.io and other random blogs.
The first iteration was seriously sketchy looking and if you bumped the table wrong the whole thing would stop working. The second iteration, I sketched out a very basic expansion for an Arduino board. It made most of the sketchy wiring into a piece of electronics that I could plug breakout boards into and get it into my plants.
It worked, it still looked pretty sketchy. What I’ll call version two was my first attempt at something I could give or sell to people. I sketched out another PCB, and this time sent it to an engineer to finish and make it look professional.
Big gizmo, little plant. It just didn’t work.
It looked a lot better, but I had missed a few key things which required a secondary module to control pumps and make powering the device easier. It works great, plugs into a plant but there are some drawbacks. This is a problem with all the in-plant sensors, it just doesn’t fit in a small plant pot, and most people have small plants.
For my large plants like my fiddle leaf fig, my big fern and a few random plants that I just put in oversized pots, it’s perfect.
The first iteration of a self-contained lid version.
Then, there is the current iteration. This brings all my learnings and all the tools in my basement workshop, namely a CNC, a little woodworking, cement casting, soldering into a final design that works really well.
The new electronics and wood casing make it really easy to put together and offers an elegant way to merge the water reservoir and the electronics without more clutter (I have enough clutter with just plants in my sunroom.
Too techy…
At first, I plugged this into some off the shelf pottery and plastic casing. I tried it with wood and a metal top, I loved how the metal top looked but ultimately it stood out a bit too much and was a little to industrial for most plant people. So I had to develop my ideal form factor and look that was natural-looking and space efficient.
Getting the reservoir just right was a major challenge, and took a long time and I had to learn casting from scratch. But I’m happy with the natural stone look and feel, but I’m also eager to keep exploring new looks and feels for the future of the FlorA Plant Tender.
The latest, and greatest!
Software is harder…
Know what’s really fun after learning C++ to create firmware for a hardware device? Seeing that you’ll probably have to learn a lot more code and exceptionally complicated ecosystems.
Basically, the FlorA Plant Tender needs to send environment data to a server, the server needs to tell the tender when to water, and what a plant might need like more light, humidity, or faster draining soil.
I started prototyping in low-code, vibe route, but there were always major challenges and clunky workarounds to get what I want.
Luckily I met my cofounder John. He developed an incredible platform for FlorA that makes setting up and operating the FlorA Plant Tender really easy.
Today, we have a really awesome app that includes care guidance, all the environmental tracking you could want, and a place to find plant care essentials and even analyze what might be wrong with a plant via AI.
Building a houseplant care database
A glimpse at the database in our app.
Do you know what should exist? A database of care instructions for houseplants. When I started building FlorA, I assumed it did. It didn’t.
Houseplant care guidelines are a mess of apocryphal nonsense and dense botanical science. So we had to build our own database that was scientifically rigorous but useful.
Today, we have an exacting database of more than 600 of the most popular houseplants and add more routinely. This database includes specific ranges for temperature, humidity, light, and soil moisture.
With this database, the FlorA Plant Tender knows exactly when and how much to water a plant and sends care guidance to the plant owner to address environmental issues.
You can check out the full database now in the FlorA Plant Care app very soon.
We’re so excited to finally be ready to share the FlorA Plant Tender with you. Get yours via our upcoming preorder. Join the mailing list below to be in the know for preorders and the ongoing evolution of automated houseplant care.