CES 2015: Parrot’s self-watering devices monitor your plant’s needs

Not all of us are blessed with green fingers, so it might be interesting to know that Parrot, the company better known for drones and headphones, has unveiled a self-watering plant device and a watering stick at CES this week.

Named ‘Pot’ and ‘H2O’, the new products send information to your smartphone via an app as they monitor your plants’ needs, helping ensure you never forget to water them again. The devices are full of sensors which keep tabs on soil moisture, temperature, fertilizer and sunlight.

The intelligent watering systems are subtle-looking, waterproof and have an impressive six-month battery life, while using Bluetooth 4.0 and 8GB of RAM to stay connected. They are a follow-on from Parrot’s ‘Flower Power’ sensor ($59), which is the same thing minus the watering function.

Pot is a watering system with a two litre water reserve. As this WSJ blog notes, four spouts make up a mini irrigation system and algorithms enable Pot to ‘decide’ when it’s best to feed your plant, and how much water to administer. Cleverly, it also has an emergency mode when water levels get low, in which it administers only the minimum amount needed to keep your plant alive until you can refill it.

H2O is a relies on a screw-top water bottle to feed plants, and can function autonomously for three weeks, making it perfect if you’re going away on holiday. It works with bottles between a half litre and two litres and sits unobtrusively in the soil.

Although Parrot hasn’t yet announced pricing for these devices, we can expect them to be available sometime in 2015.