The Botanical Twitter Kit is a sound machine for your plant

The Sound Machine — one of Roald Dahl's earlier science fiction stories — is about an inventor named Krauser who builds a device that translates higher frequency noise into audible sound. It has an unexpected secondary effect: the sound machine allows its inventor to hear the screams of vegetation as they are trampled, eaten and cut. Krauser quickly goes mad, as one does.

On the other hand, Adafruit's Botanical Twitter Kit will convert your house plant's biometric readings into Twitter posts. It uses moisture sensors to detect your plant's well-being, then connects to Twitter via Ethernet jack to send surprisingly human-like messages about the excruciating minutiae of your plant's boring, sedentary life. Tweets about how much water it just had to drink, or what the weather's like, or rhetorical questions about the location of a missing sock, or unexplained links followed by a string of unilluminating LOLs.

Yes, just like Roald Dahl's short story, the Adafruit Botanical Twitter Kit will drive you mad. But if you're the sort of person who wants to subscribe to the flotsam thoughts of a house plant and pay $160 to do so, chances are you already were.

Adafruit [Official Site via MAKE]