Kickstarter: Control your sprinklers with your smart phone | Hacker News Reader

Kickstarter: Control your sprinklers with your smart phone

kickstarter.com

18 pointsdougiebuckets11 comments

Is this really worth investing though?

I've been working on an Arduino based garden automator for the past few months and one of the things I'd like to see is some higher-level automation. There are soil moisture sensors that can be added so now you no longer need to 'schedule' it, it will just happen. Add a real time clock and you can make sure watering only occurs in the morning to avoid unnecessary evaporation.

My initial opinion of this will be that of HarvestGeek (Which I'm a backer of) and other irrigation systems from Kickstarter: they fail to deliver or are never funded. (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1408853060/a-cloud-compu..., http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/22seeds/greenbox-smart-i..., http://harvestgeek.com/forums/forums/ask-your-questions/topi...).

That being said, I need to hurry up with my project before the market becomes saturated.

I'm still waiting for xeriscape landscaping to take off outside the American Southwest. Hopefully it won't be as a necessity when we run out of water, period.

Xeriscaping and xerogardening refer to landscaping and gardening in ways that reduce or eliminate the need for supplemental water from irrigation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping

Here in the Midwest, you can't stop the lawn from growing beautifully on its own, at least in May thru July.

You can take an abandoned field and mow it once and it will look good. Maybe not great, but nice.

Watering only gets you from 75% nice to 100% gorgeous.

Yeah, a bed of rocks will grow weeds in anywhere with a reasonable climate, which means your xeriscape is not low effort anymore.

We can't run out of water. It's another question if people are willing to pay market prices for it. The only real cost is in the transportation of water - desalination is already cheap enough to provide enough water for everyone near the sea.

> Lono includes bluetooth 4.0 (LE) so the Lono app will be able to recognize the device by proximity (no pairing required). This will make setup of the device a snap– especially on iOS 7 which has an API to automatically setup wifi access.

Does anyone have any additional information on this? I would think if you're going to send over your wifi credentials, there should be some pairing involved.

This seems like overkill. http://www.amazon.com/Orbit-91213-One-Dial-Garden-Digital/dp... works phenomenally for 99% percent of cases IMO.

I'm going to guess you don't actually have a sprinkler system.

I (and virtually everyone else in my neighborhood) have a multi-zone built-in sprinkler system. A garden hose timer isn't going to help me.

None of the 6 or 7 watering zones I have are attached to a hose. It is all underground with valves and what not. That you linked to isn't really going to work with most underground sprinkler systems... which I am going to suspect account for more than 1% of the cases. I've used those types on one off watering zones and they do work. But I don't think that covers 99% of the watering people do.

Being from Utah, I love seeing useful technologies come out of our oft forgotten tech center.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com