Botanicalls 0042
I never posted about this at the time, but I found this photo on my iPhone and it reminded my that I wanted to document the brief operational existence of @botanicalls0042. (I love the clear implication that – until my mum bought this one for me – they had only sold 41 kits.)
You can find out what it does on the Botanicalls website. You can also download the extensive instructions my father and I followed to the letter in order to assemble it, equipped with a selection of wire cutters and an extremely rudimentary soldering iron.
No-one was more surprised than we were when we plugged it into the wireless router at my mum and dad’s place, and the two little LEDs flickered into life. Indeed, they managed to successfully communicate the error code denoting that Botanicalls 0042 had failed to deliver its first tweet, on the basis that it was running into the draconian security measures Orange France impose upon all their home wi-fi users.
WIth that in mind, I felt confident that once we had it back in Hackney, plugged into a router so lax on security that half the neighbourhood are drinking my bandwidth like cheap rum, it would be able to tweet freely, and begin the process of alerting me whenever the plant privileged enough to be playing host to it needed a drink of its own.
Sadly, it was not to be. In what was one of the most pointless crimes of 2008, someone stole the box containing Botanicalls0042 from our car at some point during our 3-day stay in Paris between Christmas and New Year. Unless the culprit turns out to be some sort of geek-thief, it seems likely that Botanicalls0042 is destined to never send that inaugural tweet.
I’ll keep following though, on the off-chance.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
I am relieved to spot however that as of relatively recently @Botanicalls0034 and @Botanicalls0040 seem to be doing just fine, though they are being somewhat demanding.