Skip to main content

Plant Electrodes


I've been doing more late night research on electrodes. This is a good way to create an interface between machine and plant, or machine and animal, and it's basically a wire on a living surface, like a plant or your skin somewhere, and another one close by going out to complete a circuit. It passes current through this non metallic surface, between anode and cathode, and then you measure the resistance you detect. Then the medical ones get much more complicated, and easy to apply or stick to someone.

I started thinking about electrodes when planning a slug detector project, which would use the electrode in order to detect (or cast and then measure discrepancies in) an electrical field. Casting and detecting changes in, or just detecting electrical fields is a form of animal communication used in very primitive underwater animals, mostly to hunt prey or detect possible predators. Because slugs tend to go out on rainy nights, this would work mostly when there was water around this machine. It would generate or detect an electric field the size of a slug and then fire off an action if it does (like take a photo or open a beer trap), but now I'm moving on from molluscs and applying it to plants, as a kind of home made EEG.

The reason I'm talking about these things is I've been trying to make a garden sound object (GSO), or a Musical Raga Automaton (MRA) or an Arduino Powered Renewable Energy Symbiot (APRES), but really I've not really found a good acronynm for the thing so far. It's entered into the Newcastle Maker Faire 2010, as an outdoors exhibit.

It will also have a plant monitor to detect soil humidity, a light sensor and a thermistor to detect temperature.


So back to electrodes. Various ways to spread the pain/effect - http://www.bodyclock.co.uk/acatalog/tenselectrodes.html like with those electrodes, all more comfortable than a naked wire on your skin coming from some machine. It allows my musical automaton project to consider an even deeper symbiosis, whereby it could become the musical soundtrack for either a particular patch of land, or for a particular plant, a long lasting one, such as a bush or a tree.

This might be a more advanced one. This arduino page mentions simple electrodes.

Here is someone who has built a very simple windmill system. It could be good for a distributed windmill light or battery charging project. It's the simplest possible cardboard coil generator, which I'm sure could be attached to a rotor of some kind and made into a workshoppable item, using old hard disk magnets, LED lights and some old CD cases...

I thought more about green noise, and about going around and collecting some sounds from around bristol, maybe the water in the rivers and drains, the sound of the motorway at night, the air at the top of the hill... If I can get it sounding a bit like white noise, I'll know I'm close...

Today I got a step closer to a white noise circuit, but also built the Lady Ada Wave Shield, which I now hope to get working on my Seeeduino. Which brought me to consider once again the outdoor garden musical automaton(OGMA) and what sensors it should have, how it should interface with people and plants.

It should play each day differently through the year, so that in 30 degree heat you get more wave recordings and longer more intense sounds, using the higher amounts of energy collected by the solar panels and / or windmills on it. I don't know where to put a stop to it, but it will take a lot of testing - adding and removing piezos, wether sensing or buzzing, adding/removing light sensors, getting a temperature sensor and testing out a simple electrode or 10 on a plant (my poor aloe vera is wincing at the prospect).

In the winter, it will only play sparse sounds and try and calculate it's current remaining before attempting anything complex.

At night, the Noise Generating Automaton (NGA) will monitor certain readings, and go into a low power mode, still powered mostly by windmills charging some batteries. It will build a file with statistics based on these readings, and use that in the morning when it wakes up.

When light passes a certain threshold, it will generate a low frequency noise which increases as light does. When the sun is almost up, it will have got to being like a base tune, which jams following a pattern dictated by the temperature and humidity sensor's readings for the night.

Using Lady Ada's wave shield, some simple speaker housing, some piezo buzzers (here is an early test of one) and some natural resonant housing, I can produce enough amplification to create this hopefully inobtrusive garden soundtracker(HIGS). What is left to figure out is what to put it in that is both pleasing to look at and resistant to the humid newcastle climate... I'm considering Sugru and sealed glass or if all else fails, the typical plastic containers that you can buy at maplins again, for a few squid (Ah, another mollusc!).

The Garduino project will provide great help I think, as will Mike Skylar's experiments.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How could Scotland have a more resilient food system?

The question that's led me to write this has been how do we adapt long term, specifically here in Scotland, where I live now, to coronavirus and the idea that pandemics are here to stay if we stay this industrialised and globalised. How does a society look if it's to be resilient long term, sensible and ecologically regenerative? We do know a few things about this novel coronavirus that we seem to be slowly figuring out as it evolves and spreads, and I have almost a picture of how it might look in my head. Here is the closest I can get so far to it, on a regional scale at least: In the picture, each block is a community of several households and work spaces, and each green space is where they grow crops, or graze animals. So why this system? Around the time when it was obvious a lockdown was coming, I read a community organisation manual that mentioned how graph theory applies to limiting the spread of something like Covid-19. It advocates getting together with your clos

Poem for peace, from a pirate recording in a Cairo Museum.

My love With peace I have placed loving flowers at your feet With peace With peace I stopped the seas of blood for you Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come Come and live with me my love Under a blanket of peace I want you to sing, beloved light of my eyes And your song will be for peace let the world hear, my beloved and say: Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come And live in peace These I believe are the words of a widow at the tomb of her beloved. I got the words from this italian website . It was used in a seminal Italian anti-war song " Luglio Agosto Settembre Nero " by the band Area (although I guess they weren't called anti-war songs then) - whose vocalist Demetrio Stratos indirectly gives the name to this blog, and whose music is the inspiration for a lot of my mine. It's adapted in turn from a greek folk song, but no-one knows who wrote the original words, except that Stratos was probably