Hi Eden Keeper! 👋😊
Mirko speaks here, and I’d love to tell you how our project started — and what’s coming next as we work to make Dot a product ready for the market.
Everything began about two years ago, when I moved from a small countryside village in central Italy to the city of Turin for work.
I’ve always been passionate about nature, but living in an apartment made me miss that connection with the natural world. That distance gradually pushed me to create what you can now see on our website.
Before Dot, there was another project — a smart terrarium case that I was developing with a few friends. Unfortunately, for several reasons, we had to abandon it. But the core idea behind Dot comes directly from that experience.
Dot was born out of my personal need to have a small piece of nature close to me — on my desk at home or at the office. I wanted something that could help keep a terrarium alive even away from a window, and that could take care of itself whenever I forgot to.
For work, I design and prototype devices for companies, mostly focusing on software development. But this time, I wanted to create something for myself — a personal project.
One evening, my friend Arturo came over to my place. He noticed this strange gadget sitting on my desk, so I showed him how it worked and why I was building it. After a moment, he said:
“I want to work on this with you — let’s build it together!”
Arturo is an electronics engineer, and his expertise gave the project the technical boost it needed. That’s when Dot truly started to come to life. 🌱
The idea behind Dot was simple: a cork lid containing all the electronics needed to manage and automate the terrarium.
My first prototype featured a color touch display, a feature I was determined to keep. At one point, we considered removing it to lower production costs, but in the end, we decided to keep it.
The display allows users to interact directly with the device, customize settings easily, and do it all without needing an internet connection or smartphone.
At that point, Dot was no longer just my personal experiment — it was becoming a product for all terrarium lovers.
After several iterations on the external design, software, and internal components, we finally built the first fully functional version of Dot.
What you can see on the website today is still a prototype, but it already captures the essence of the final product.
There’s still a lot of work ahead, but we believe that the Kickstarter campaign can give us the push we need to make this ambitious idea a tangible reality.
We’re now working toward two major goals for the final, market-ready version of Dot:
- Using recycled plastics for all the external shell parts.
- Reducing the height of the device to make it slimmer, more elegant, and visually appealing.
We’re putting our hearts into transforming what began as a personal need into a beautiful, meaningful product, and to grow Microeden into a brand that can take on new challenges and create innovative green design solutions for the future.
Thank you so much for reading our story — and for being part of this journey.
If you want to support the Kickstarter campaign : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/microeden/microeden-dot
Talk to you soon! 💚
