This year, she was the youngest speaker ever at HOPE with her talk inspiring the next, next generation of hackers. When she's not working on talks, hacking, teaching lock-picking,

or inventing new things, she's enjoying fencing, archery, singing, and acting. Make sure you follow her on the Twitters at BSI Lab and check her always changing website, www.bscilab.com.

Put your hands together for the exciting and dynamic BSI Lab. Thanks for coming to my talk. I'm so excited. I'll try to chill. I'll do my best, I promise, people.

And welcome to the water bot, the hackable plant control system with yours truly, BSI Lab. Throw about me, here we go again. Turning 12 soon, yay, into science, programming,

electronics, fencing, singing, archery, lock-picking, hacking, and playing. See, there's me fencing an adult over there, and then that's me archery. Since this is the water bot, where did this idea even start?

Well, it started at HOPE 11. I met Sebastian, who's a biologist and a biohacker. He's super cool guy, very tall too. He guided me on researching Oxalis stricta. And look over here, this is me cloning a tobacco plant in the MS media, a gel form of it.

You'll hear what that is later. And then this is me using a pipette for my project when I studied it and weighed it. And speaking of Oxalis stricta, you're all like, dude, what is that anyway? It's not a clover.

See, this is a clover over here. That's Oxalis. It's also called common yellow wood sorrel, but no one should call that it's just too long. So just call it Oxalis. It's edible, not too much, kidney failure, because it has oxalic acid in it. And oxalic acid causes kidney stone.

Oxalic acid was also named after Oxalis, because, you know, had the most oxalic acid, because it's Oxalis. And this is the clover. See how the clover is round shaped and has sometimes those white spot thing in the middle? Well, Oxalis has yellow flowers

and it's heart-shaped leaves, literally heart-shaped like a perfect heart and it doesn't have any of this white gunk on it. Oxalis acid. Its name comes from the fact that early investigators isolated oxalic acid from wood sorrel, Oxalis,

flowering plants. And what are the uses of it? For like cleaning agents and bar keepers friend, whatever that's for, they use it in that.

And vaporized oxalic acid is used by some beekeepers as a might aside. See those little mites over here, they kill the bees. So they spray it on, see that little white dusty stuff, and it kills those ugly, mighty things. But they're actually kind of cute if you look at them, but anyway, they're horrible.

Back to the bots, because you're tired of hearing about plants. Well, in my fifth grade science fair, I used the MS Media Modulation of Oxalis strycta. No one has done any real research on this plant. Like if you look at Wikipedia,

you get a few sentences done, you know? And I want to learn more about it. So I did the MS Media Modulation is the first step, because you know, you need to know what a plant likes to eat so you can clone and study it. Edgernscuge, I know that's very hard to pronounce

and I'm not even sure how to pronounce it because it's Japanese, but I call it the MS Media. Yeah, cause that's easier. It contains all the macronutrients and micronutrients that a plant needs separated into five groups of chemicals.

The amount of each group is modulated like more, more, more, you know. And it's about $120 for the whole set of chemicals. The strongest one wins. So I did it. And I did groups one through five are modulated individually.

Amount of one chemical group is modulated. I did ammonium nitrate and others are left standard, you know, normal, common, whatever. Plants are then dried and measured and weighed because I mean, plants consist of a lot of water. So to see their normal actual weight,

you have to dry them. And see that little tiny thing, that little funnel thing over there? That is horrible, evil. The devil in a form of a funnel, you'll see why later. On ammonium nitrate, one of the chemicals,

actually the first chemical. And I varied the amount by zero, half, one, one and a half, and then two. I did five sets of 10 pots, three seeds each. Don't worry about doing the math. I did it on a calculator because it's easier that way. And that's 150 plants.

I grew the plants in a 50-50 mix of vermiculite and perilite. Organic with no extras, like no extra minerals. More about that later. The plants were fed on a cycle. See, that's me putting all the tiny seeds. The seeds are so small, you can barely even see them. Trust me, it was painful.

So the neutral growth medium, you know, I talked about perilite and vermiculite. Well, basically what are those? Vermiculite holds water, you know, it's just collects all the water and holds it in. And then the perilite gives the plant something to hold onto, like sand does, you know?

So the plant just grips it like soil, you know? But it has nothing in it. Always get the organic ones with no fertilizer if you want to add your own fertilizers to see if that works. And the first time, me and dad didn't look at the package and got the one with fertilizer.

We had to redo the whole project all over again. All of those 150 plants. God, that was painful. Control, back to the bots. Like I said, I used a raspberry pie to turn on the lights for 16 hours each day.

The pie would turn on the lights, take three pictures during the day, then turn off the lights and tweet every other day at Be a Bialab. It's different than Be a Silab, different Twitter account, and you can see all the pictures. For example, this is one of the pictures, see, of the oxalis growing.

It's almost a water bot. It connected the relay to control the lights. The pie cam takes all the pictures. Twi-Thon took care of the tweets and used a cron to job for the timing.

This is a little video of it growing. It shifted a lot, but it's fine. Better than nothing, eh? So just watch it. Doo, doo, da, dee, da, dee, doo, da, dee. And it's about to grow. Well, something else is gonna grow first. You'll see.

Wait for it, wait for it. See, look, they're kind of sprouting. See that one little green one right over there? And see this green stuff just oozing all around? That's moss. The green moss that was like floating in the air, all those particles, came on and grew. But that didn't change anything. You know, it was just there like a little,

a little piece of gum stuck on your shoe that one night, you know, that you just hate. Hint, never spit your gum on the floor, it's horrible. See, look, they're growing. Aren't they so pretty? And as you can notice, see how they close from time to time? At nighttime, they actually close at night

because they can't collect any more light. See, isn't that cool? Like little umbrellas, like at nighttime, you close the umbrella. It's as if they're not even there, like they're hiding. Camouflage, am I right? Blend in with that moss. And look how big they grow. This is in how many weeks, Dad? 12 weeks.

And done. And then black. The plants were measured and dried and weighed again because of the water. And I saw the less ammonium nitrate, the better the plant did. Then I'll do every single group of chemicals and then study the plant and do everything. And you remember that little stupid little funnel thing

I pointed out? Well, this sucks. Carefully pour MS Media into a one inch funnel, that little twerk. Filling was not an option

because if one plant got more than the rest, it'll grow like woo while the others are dee-be-dee. So face to face, I said, next year must do even.

Well, I had to sense when the liquid is out, you know, to the bottom and then fill to a set level on a cycle, measure the amount dispensed and then print the results or save to a database. And then the raspberry pi must be open source.

So I had to measure the liquid level. I used two wires to sense the voltage through the liquid. Not the best way. Cheap, good for the science fair. You know why? Copper corrodes people. Have you seen that Statue of Liberty? She's like green and covered in bird poop now.

Other methods, you could use the level sensor, you know, that measures the right level. You could use a soil moisture sensor and measures the resistance in the soil or a float switch. When it gets to a certain level, it closes.

I use a peristaltic pump. The same ones they use for like the blood machines when they like remove your heart and heart surgery. Those that pump the blood, that's a peristaltic pump. Some use a stepper mortar to dispense a set amount.

Like over here, pretend that's like four milliliters. I don't know. And then it dispenses. And once it does two, that means it's eight milliliters. But the more affordable ones, which are great because it's affordable, money people. It just uses a motor, which is bad

because it doesn't measure the amount, like really. So, measuring the liquid. Did this turn off? Dad, it ran out of battery, I think. Okay, just great. What, now it turns on? Dude, okay. It measured the liquid with a flow sensor.

It generates the pulses as liquid flows and the pie cancel the pulses, see? Look at that handy dandy little guy. And then we had to print the results. I used a thermal printer from Adafruit's thermal library. It could store or write to a database.

Lots of code if not, but it made it easy. Like Adafruit people, yay! And then I had to put it all together. I made a prototype on a breadboard and then I did all my schematics in Fritzing. See, these are my schematics. Ta-da! See, for example, there's the pump

and then here's the raspberry pie. Here are those dumb little copper wire things. Here's the thermal printer. You know, the resistor, resistors are handy. People see a little thing. And then I moved it to the actual board in my PJs, as you see here.

See? Isn't that pretty? Better than that model type. And this is the final product. This is a waterproof container. Oh, and these stickers will be available afterwards, be it Bot Lab stickers. See, this is the side. There's the pump and the flow sensor. See, look how pretty and confusing that is.

See, because it has all those wires. And this is inside. There's the pie and the breadboard. And ta-da! Add-ons, because who doesn't like upgrades in add-ons? No one, right? Unless you're old school. The Raspberry Pi has multiple GPIO,

general purpose input-output pins. And there are actually 27, so you can do a lot with it. The WaterBot only uses four, empty, full, pump, and flow. And you could do the full five-part MS media, including the photos and the printer,

all with just one Raspberry Pi. They're so useful, people, like get one. If you don't know what that is, go ask someone, get one, buy one, play with it, people, it's awesome. And what else? Well, these are a few more things you could do. You could control the LED lighting to shift the color temperature,

to trick the plants, thinking it's a different season, like making them flower or make fruit quicker or things like that. And then control heating pad to read the soil temperature. And you can make it even hotter or colder. Like if you wanna grow cactus and they like hotter, then you can add the pad

and you can control the heating and make it nice and cozy. And then you could add additional liquids, like liquid fertilizer, or you could put it in a sealed space and allow gas control, like more carbon dioxide or less oxygen or no oxygen.

Heh heh heh. No, that wouldn't work out. Time, the time you've all been waiting for. Is in my GitHub repository, all in Python. I use global constants. I know in Python there are no constants, but it's easy to add an upgrade and comment, yay!

These are my pin constants. See, water empty was four, water full is 17, flow sensor is 18, relay is 27, and you can change that around. Or if you wanted to add the next, you know, chemical set, you could do water empty two is seven,

full is 12, 16, 23. You can do anything. I mean, Raspberry Pi's people. Now get your pens and paper out and get ready to write down all the code. In three, two, one.

I'm working on, if you guys like horses, then hold your horses. I know, that was funny. I'm sorry, I like my puns.

This is really sad, so I'm gonna try to say it too. So in the winter, if horses don't drink enough water, or drink too much water, then they get dry poop stuck in their stomach.

Surgery to get it removed. And 80% of the time, the horse is talking. A horse water bot will measure the amount of water the horses drink in the winter, use machine learning to alert caretakers

if the horse is not drinking enough. If the horses do not drink enough, they can die from the surgery, like I said. Like Shadow, this is my neighbor Ed. Well, basically across the street diagonally. He has a horse, he works at a horse farm and this is one of his horses, Shadow.

So he can tell like, if Shadow isn't drinking enough water, they can like alert the doctors, vets, I mean, cause like, who takes their horse to a real doctor? That's just weird. Unless you have a horse throat.

Okay, that was funny, I know. So there are a lot of things you can do with this water bot. You can add on anything to it. You could even think of some things you could add on to it now.

So now it's your turn to make something awesome. Everything is awesome, everything is cool. No, no one, Lego movie. If you didn't watch it, watch it. Questions.