Planter Coughs for Poor Air Quality

Whether outdoors or in nature, viewing live plants make us think of clean air, and perhaps happy spring days that we are now experiencing in the northern hemisphere. On the other hand, just because there are green plants around, doesn’t mean the air quality is actually good right this second. To imbue a houseplant with the ability to show off this stat, hacker “msbirfday” designed a planter that not only holds a plant on top, but hides electronics — including a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an SGP30 air-quality sensor to take readings.

The sensor passes along air information to the Pi via the I2C protocol, and a series of holes on the front of the planter let an LED strip shine through to indicate what’s going on. If the air quality is good, the LEDs light up and dim as if it was happily breathing. However if the air is poor, it will instead play a coughing sound on a built-in speaker and pulse a red light to indicate its “annoyance.”

While interesting as-is, with the Pi Zero W onboard, its abilities could be expanded even more. A soil moisture sensor would make sense, or it could tweet out the air quality as needed. One could even add a set of wheels and a photosensor to make the plant follow the sunlight as a sort of plant-computer hybrid creature!