Plantas Parlantes
Hardware prototype for talking plants
A standalone prototype of the Plantas Parlantes plant-stick with its own speaker, class-D amplifier and battery power, built with Fritzing.
Commissioned by the Patching Zone we developed and produced a standalone prototype of the PlantasParlantes project. The breadboard design was converted to a more stable plant-stick object, with speaker, batteries and amplifier on board, while also keeping the product energy efficient.
Plantas Parlantes as a resulting project of V2’s Patching Zone and Recycle-X. It used the conductivity of plants as a musical instrument to make the plants “talk”. Plantas Parlantes was presented at the e-culture Fair in Dortmund, where we also were to present Fritzing.
Because the project there was in breadboard stage, exactly the phase in product development for which Fritzing offers an elegant, flexible and open source solution, it was quickly decided that it was interesting to have the Plantas Parlantes project be produced as a more stable prototype with the help of Fritzing.
The main objective of this prototype was to have the resulting board or product produce its own sound, in contrast with the Dortmund setup, where external wires and external off-the-shelf amplified speakers were used. If the Plantas Parlantes project were to make it as a standalone product or gift, it needed to have its own sound source. And thus we started testing different amplifiers, speakers, battery power sources and amplification rates.
The resulting prototype features a small class-D amplifier, together with a small speaker, which can operate on a few small AAA-batteries. We also added a switching potentiometer to control the sound level and be able to turn the device on or off.
