Creating a language with light
This sprint was all about doing, thus we decided to make it a making Sprint. After all, we are part of the Digital to Physical track.
Maybe you still remember the first prototype we made. It was the Smart Ring from Sprint 2. It was a product that not just monitored your plants, it even made it possible to stack your plants and create a vertical garden. The Smart Ring had some flaws and unpractical features. Some of them were:
- When constructing your tower, you had to stack pots. This made the structure unstable after stacking a few pots
- The structure was so big that it covered up most of your plant
- The concept was limiting the possibilities of monitoring multiple plants
- A concept like this would make sense for other companies rather than VodafoneZiggo
So we killed our darling, and we needed a new one. As you know, if you want to come up with a crazy idea you need to rack our brains.
Ideation
Before we could start making something, we mapped the present scenario together as a team and later individually did ideation. After individual ideation, we sat together and followed the “yes, and…” method to develop those ideas further as a proper concept.
As you can see, we were all dreaming about the ideas we could make. We made lots of sketches, but together as a team we came up with one concept. We call it the Branch & Stem concept. The picture below will give you a global idea of how this system will work.
This concept consists of 3 parts:
- The sensor sticks which goes in the pot next to the plant
- A Central unit, which not just collects information from the sensor sticks but also notifies the user of the overall garden health, using light/sound/vibration etc.
- An application which receives data from the central unit and gives detailed information to the user about each and every plant in the garden
The sensor sticks consist of sensors, a battery, and a chip which connects to wifi. It will measure 3 factors.
The moisture of the soil
The amount of light around the plant
The temperature of the air
Once the central unit receives the data, it should notify the user when something is wrong. There are various ways to notify the user, so we created 2 prototypes.
Prototype 1
The central unit uses light to notify the user. Imagine you have five different plants in your house. Every plant has a Sensor Stick stuck into the soil that is measuring the moisture, light intensity, and room temperature.
One of the plants hasn’t had water for a day. Now the Branch will turn yellow. Half a day later the plant still didn’t get water, so the branch turns orange. If the user waits a little longer, the Branch will turn red. The user now knows that one of the plants has trouble with the amount of water in the soil, the light intensity or the temperature. To get more detail the user can go to the application and see in detail which plants are not okay and which factors it’s about.
Prototype 2
With prototype 1 you can just see your overall garden status but in prototype 2, you can see your individual plant status in the central unit itself. You can see your entire garden on a small platform. The color of each piece on this platform shows the state of the plant. The form of each piece relates with the form of the sensor stick you put next to your plant. In the picture, you can see that there are two wooden sticks in the pot. They represent the Sensor Sticks located right next to the plant.
The big difference between the two prototypes is that Prototype 1 shows an overview of your garden all in one, while Prototype 2 shows the plant’s health individually which makes you less dependent on the app.
Events
Besides all the hard work we did during Sprint 4 we also had some super cool events. These events gave us the opportunity to share our ideas and prototypes, receive feedback about the prototypes and of course do some networking. We pitched our project during the Internet of People event, Alumni event and the Vodafone Ziggo Student Dinner. Here are some pictures!
Next Steps
So this sprint we made two prototypes. The prototypes look nice and the LED lights are working. But we were not able yet to accomplish all the functionalities. The LED light should change based on the measurements of the sensors: this will be a goal for our next sprint.
Next, to that, we will be designing the UI of the app. A lot of the functionality is there already, now let's make it pretty. Designing the UI and implementing it in the app will be another goal for the next Sprint.
Besides that, we are trying to find a good combination of both prototypes. While testing the two prototypes, we got really good insights into how we can improve this and how to combine the best parts of both prototypes.
Thank you for reading! We hope we see you again in our next post!
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