The Internet of Things Comes To Your Garden 66
Iddo Genuth writes Connected devices are becoming ubiquitous — a number of new companies are now offering WIFI and BT enabled devices that can let you control almost all aspects of your garden from your smartphone or tablet, save you money on water and allow you to monitor your plant's health from a distance. In the past few months we have seen an explosion of new companies and products belonging to the 'Internet Of Things' (IOT) and this trend isn't skipping the garden. For years irrigation controllers were amongst the most hated, unintuitive devices around, but a new generation of small start-up companies such as Rachio, GreenIQ and GreenBox are looking to change that. They want to create completely new ways to interact with our garden which will be more wireless and more connected (with lots of smart sensors that will tell us what is going on with our plants before it's too late).
Waste of Tech (Score:3, Insightful)
Ever wonder why, after almost a century of technological development, a lot of small time and hobby farmers still drive 1940's era tractors?
A, because they're cheap to buy and fix. B, because if it ain't broke, it don't need fixin'.
I'm sure all these fancy garden toys are quite popular with the hipster, urban-farming-because-its-hip crowd, but for actual subsistence farming? Not so much.
We don't need a complicated technical "solution" (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been using this wonderful device for controlling drip irrigation:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... [amazon.com]
The user interface is brain-dead simple. The dial simply has 17 settings, for ... ...
1: Daily for 2 minutes
2: Daily for 5 minutes
3: Daily for 10 minutes
7: Every other day for 5 minutes
8: Every other day for 10 minutes
12: Every third day for 10 minutes
13: Every third day for 15 minutes
That's it! There isn't an option for "2 minutes every 3 days" because -- guess what -- gardeners don't actually need that level of control! It just has a laser focus on a simple user interface that will be good for 99% of residential customers.
Would my life be better if I had to change the batteries in the irrigation controller every 5 days to power its wifi? Or if I had to run mains power and Ethernet cabling out into the garden for it? Would my life be better if I had a fiddly iPhone/Android app with more settings pages than I'd care to use, maybe a cloud-based controller like my Nest? Do I ever go on holiday and wish I'd changed the watering schedule before departing?
NO.