The problem
Plant biosignals can be difficult to connect to everyday actions. For the Vivent office in Zeist, I wanted colleagues to see how the office plants were doing at a glance, while a friendly competition gave them another reason to follow the signals and care for their plants.
The approach
I built a native Python and PySide6 dashboard for a dedicated Raspberry Pi wall display. It refreshes every five minutes and combines water alerts, the Plant Squad overview and a provisional weekly champion. Completed weekly results are stored locally in SQLite and feed a Hall of Fame with wins, recent winners and average winning scores.
The challenge
A leaderboard only makes sense when the underlying measurements are usable. Missing data, stale readings and sensor maintenance must remain visible. The interface therefore shows data completeness and online coverage, and the documented workflow separates recalibration from normal competition participation.
Care and competition on one screen
Three views turn a stream of sensor measurements into something colleagues can follow together.
- Plants Need Water: a persistent low-water signal triggers a prominent multilingual message asking colleagues to check the soil.
- Plant Squad: health, water, activity and nutrient indicators for the monitored plants, with missing or stale data clearly marked.
- Plant of the Week: a provisional Monday-to-Sunday ranking and a Hall of Fame that preserves completed weekly winners.
Designed to keep running
The installation includes automatic startup, restart after a crash, local caching and a visible offline state. A daily sensor synchronisation can add newly active sensors, while a two-step shutdown control and a scheduled 17:00 shutdown support unattended office use.
A public demo with private production data
The public repository contains the interface, synthetic demonstration data, history storage, tests and service configuration. The production database connector and scoring rules are kept separately. The public demo can therefore be explored without credentials or access to Vivent measurements. The project logo represents this case study; it is not an official Vivent corporate logo.
Outcome & value
A dedicated office dashboard that makes plant monitoring more approachable through a weekly competition and a persistent winners’ history. It combines practical care prompts with a playful reason to look at the data. The public repository demonstrates the implementation; it does not report a measured improvement in plant health or employee engagement.
Lessons learned
A playful product still needs transparent rules and careful handling of incomplete data. Showing provisional results, measurement coverage and finalized winners makes the competition easier to understand and trust.
Evidence & artifacts
- CODE
The public repository contains the demo and shared project components. Production data, internal connectors and scoring rules remain within Vivent.