A walk in Karstett park led me to realize that while the plants and trees in the park received ample sunlight, many indoor plants in our homes miss out on our attention sometimes. If I were an indoor plant…I would need a way to communicate to my care-giver that I need more sunlight or water. After a bit more speculation, I realized that some of these plants might be getting too much sunlight or water…which could also be harmful. If a plant is listed as Partial Shade, it needs about 3-4 hours of sunlight a day and will need some relief from the intense late afternoon sun, either from shade provided by a nearby tree or planting it on the east side of a building. However, urban lifestyles don’t support such situations…..So I decided my exploration of empathy with a non-human user would center around indoor plants…
On the way back from the park, Ronny and I had a discussion about this and shared some ideas. Ronny suggested that there could be a paper fan that opens out and provides shade to the plant when it has had enough sunlight….So it would be like an autonomous system that acts on behalf of the plant when it has had too much sunlight…
In order to construct this system, we used an arduino uno, a photocell sensor and a servo motor(to power the paper-fan-opening mechanism). The code comprised of an if-clause where the program would check if there was a certain amount of light present and then delay for the time that the plant needs the sunlight….and then power the servo motor to open the fan and shade the plant. A simple for-loop with a short delay ensured gradual sweeping motion of the servo…
While making the prototype, we experimented with a number of fan mechanisms and realized that the servo was not powerful enough to move the fan. Below you can see the mechanism in action….