Melatova

Smart Tillandsia Care

The air plant sanctuary lit at night, NeoPixel rings glowing blue through the glass

A compact, slightly over-engineered habitat that keeps a colony of tillandsia alive on a schedule instead of on my memory.

Air plants take their water from the air, which means they want misting rather than watering — and they want it often enough that a person will inevitably forget. So the vase does it: a tiered sensor array reads the environment, a piezo atomizer mists on a cycle, a submersible pump handles the reservoir, and an OLED and a pair of NeoPixel rings report what is going on. It publishes to the cloud so I can check it from anywhere.

Air plant sanctuary in a glass hurricane vase with copper tubing and tiered planting
Air plant sanctuary seen from another angle, plants tiered above the electronics
Close view of tillandsia air plants in the gravel dish
The empty hurricane vase with its copper coil, shown for scale
Line drawing concept of air plants in a gravel dish being misted
CAD render of the custom gravel dish designed for the air plants
Annotated cross-section showing the plant zone, electronics and water reservoir inside the hurricane vase
Plant Habitat Monitor dashboard with humidity and temperature gauges, pump controls and a reservoir refill button
Fritzing wiring diagram for the plant habitat monitor

Built from

  • Particle Photon 2
  • SparkFun BME280 atmospheric sensor
  • Grove capacitive soil moisture sensor
  • Grove air quality sensor v1.3
  • SSD1306 OLED display
  • 5 V submersible pump and a piezo atomizer with oscillator board
  • Grove optocoupler relay (M281)
  • Two NeoPixel WS2812 rings
  • Custom gravel dish, designed and printed to fit the vase
Read the full build on Hackster →

Platform — Particle, Adafruit IO, Seeed Studio, SparkFun
Year — 2026

This idea is twenty-one years old. In 2005 I drew a conceptual design for an indoor irrigation system — a green interior that waters itself, with a valve and a timer worked out in watercolour. This vase is that drawing, built.

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