“Anastatica sensibile” is an installation created to study around natural processes as medium for interactivity. It was designed last year by the italian artist Daniela Di Maro in collaboration with the Software Architecture Laboratory of Milan.

The installation has been conceived around the properties of a specific plant species, the Rose of Jericho (Selaginella Lepidophylla): a desert plant known for its ability to survive in almost complete drought conditions.

During dry weather in its native habitat, its stems curl into a tight ball looking like a bare root, but after watering it, it turns green in about one day and that’s why some call it “resurrection plant”.

The installation irrigates  45 Roses of Jericho controlling them with an interactive system that monitors the number of people around the installation and activates watering according to it:

When the number significantly increases, one plant is randomly selected: the LED of the selected plant blinks for ten seconds. When a plant has been selected for a certain number of times, the digital system irrigates the plant and its LED is turned on […] An irrigated plant is excluded by the selection process for about four days, a time sufficient for the plant to regenerate itself and then to return in the “closed” state because
of the absence of water.

Two electronic control units  manage forty five LEDs and forty-five electro-valves, using an Arduino Mega microcontroller each, plus a specific, self-made Printed Circuit Board.

You can read the specifics of the project on this PDF hosted on the project page in the Bicocca Open Archive.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Thursday, June 27th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Led(s), Mega.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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The Lesser Kestrel (Falco naumanni) is a small falcon at the center of HORUS, a project aiming to develop a system for automatic real-time monitoring of colonial falcons at Doñana Biological Station, a public Research Institute in Spain.

The falcons breed in nest-boxes on the window sills which the  research team converted into “smart nest-boxes”: they have sensors to identify the falcons entering the box using RFID tags, but also cameras and other equipment controlled by and Arduino Mega.

That’s how they use it:

This board is based on the ATmega2560, an economic, low power and robust microcontroller. It controls and processes the nest’s sensor information. This board communicates with sensors and other components, and processes the collected information that is sent to the process server over the communication interface.
The program implemented in the microcontroller performs the following tasks:
- Communicates with the process server over a communication interface, and synchronize clock time with this.
- Checks infra-red barriers. Each nest-box has two infra-red barriers at both extremes of the corridor. The sequence in which they are activated indicates whether birds enter or leave the nest-box.
- Checks if the RFID reader has read a code from ringed kestrels.
- Obtains the body mass measurement from a digital balance.
- Reads the temperature and humidity of the nest.
- Controls the RFID reader to identify individuals.

You can follow daily updates on their Facebook page and find all the info on the Wiki of the Horus  project.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Monday, June 24th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Enviroment, ethernet, Mega, research, science, shield.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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