Background

Key roles in the project:

• Programmed the software of the artefact.
  
  
• Co-Authored published academic pictorial.
  
  
• Edited and co-produced artefact presentation video.
  
  
• Designed hardware architecture of components.
  
  
• Ideated the design materials and their interaction points of the concept.
  
  

The plant-radio was build as part of the research project Growing Codesign, a one-year NOVA-funded research collaboration at Aarhus University.

The purpose was to explore people's relation with their plants by being able to tap into the plant's electrophysiological signals and output the data as sound, pulsating lights and a graph. It was produced as part of a research project called Growing CoDesign, and we want it to live on here on Instructables for other people to have the same experience of communicating with plants.


The radio processes the electrophysiological signals of the plant and transforms it into three different outputs:

1. Visualisation - a running graph on the screen maps the data
2. Sonification - an audio intepretation of the plant comes out of the speakers
3. Illumination - pulsating light in changing colors represent the shift in the plant’s different states
   
   

Constructing the Plant Radio

Casing: The main body of the radio is made in laser cut plywood. We 3D printed turnknobs and also a mount that is inside the radio holding the LED strip in place. We've also attached a leather strap onto the radio to make it portable.

Software: The radio runs on a Raspberry Pi 3+, where the data comes from an EMG sensor into an Arduino sketch, which controls the LED lights and forwards the data to a Processing sketch that draws the graph, and also a OpenData patch that handles the sounds.

You can see a detailed construction guide at: www.instructables.com/Plant-radio/

Presenting & Publishing the Plant Radio

As part of the Growing Codesign research project, an academic pictorical was produced and published as part of the DIS'22 Conference.

Furthermore, the Plant Radio also took part in the local maker faire, an event celebrating maker culture for makers around Aarhus.

You can see the publication and read the abstract at the following site:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532106.3533517
(In order to access the whole pictorial, you will need a registered user for the ACM Digital Library)

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What happens when you cross a humanoid rodent and Storm P. contraptions with game design?
See the answer here!