Plunter

Plunter addresses a simple premise: most people don't know what their houseplant needs, and most sensor readouts don't communicate in a way that feels meaningful. The goal was to bridge that gap.

Using a Raspberry Pi and Arduino Uno, the system reads soil moisture levels and translates them into spoken language via an AI-generated voice model — trained specifically on a professor's voice, which adds an incongruous pedagogical quality to the plant's communications.

The project sits at the edge of ambient computing and speculative design: a plant that speaks, in someone else's voice, about its own needs. It works. It is also a little strange.