A Smart Lawn Sprinkler System?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm about to install a sprinkler system for my lawn. There are lots of timers and computers out there to automate the watering of your lawn. However, before I go out and buy something, I wanted to know if there are any interesting open source projects for watering lawns. I've heard about smart sprinklers that get weather from the internet/satellite and water accordingly. What have other Slashdot readers done?"

Comments

Just get a good timer

[linuxwrangler]

"Smart" means getting tried and true equipment designed for the purpose. A good timer will do everything you need reliably and with minimum power draw. Just be sure to get a timer with non-volatile memory and a backup battery for the clock.

Any decent timer will allow you to add a rain sensor that will turn off the sprinklers if it rains. Most rain sensors consist of pieces of material that absorb water and swell up causing them to push a switch. The sprinklers won't resume till the sensor dries out and the amount of moisture needed to stop the sprinklers is adjustable. Butt simple and reliable.

If you want to get way fancy then you can get a system that incorporates soil moisture sensors.

Depending on your situation you may want to check out subsurface drip irrigation for the lawn. Subsurface drip is generally more expensive but really excels 1) in very hot areas, 2) for oddly shaped or narrow areas that don't work well with sprinklers, 3) where it is often windy and 4) on steep slopes.

MisterHouse ... It Knows Kung Fu

[2TecTom]

"Code has been written for DSC Alarm pannels, Stargate LCD displays, Slinke IR send/receive, Marrick X10, RCI X10 sprinklers, Xantech preamps, ISDN modems, voice modems, ComPool and Aqualink pool equipment"

http://www.misterhouse.net/

There's several perl sprinkler scripts ...

I use X10 and Indigo

[Frogbeater]

I had tried X-10 years ago and it seemed pretty lame, but I recently installed the latest hardware on my home server and bought a Rain8 and a rain sensor and it works great.
The best part is that the Indigo software for OSX that drives the X10 has an awesome community who have come up with plenty of ways to do what you're asking about.

Re:$20 solution for a $1 problem

[Judg3]

Back in the early days of the space program, NASA spent tens of thousands of dollars on research to develop a pen that would write in zero gravity. The Russians used a five cent pencil.

No, no they didn't.