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The Internet of Things Comes To Your Garden
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).
yet this
for hated software!
Advanced Mycorrhizal networking technology, as pioneered by fungi at least 400 million years ago, has been providing advanced inter-plant networking technology (as well as a robust nutrient exchange infrastructure) since you were small, shrew-like, creatures busy 'disrupting' dinosaurs.
Bah!
I do; my wife
actually, she loves gardening
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.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I've been using this wonderful device for controlling drip irrigation:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
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.
Wifi interference / trying to get an outside single. May get in the way of this working good.
Most of my property is xeriscaped.
The rest is planter boxes with vegetables.
I manually, by hand, water my drought tolerant plants maybe twice a week.
I manually, by hand, water my planter box vegetables, herbs, fruit, etc usually daily.
What I have to water isn't huge, but it takes a while.
I actually enjoy watering. I get to see my plants, check how they are doing, etc;
I actually check the soil and how moist it is, see what bugs there are/aren't, the status of my garden in general as I water.
Maybe I'm odd but I actually like doing it.
I would assume if someone had a massive garden/yard then doing some kind of app based control of multiple drip systems, etc would be the way to go, but for me I would rather Keep It Simple Stupid. Plus I don't have to dick around with all of the management that comes with drip systems, sprinklers(nightmare), apps, phone settings, blah, blah, blah.
For me the garden is a way to get away from tech for a while.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The company created a small, slick-looking, controller that costumers can connect instead of their old irrigation controller
I hope that Garden Gnome costume isn't too tight around the waist!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The Internet of Things Comes To Your Garden
Again with the "your." Unless the powers that be are going to force people to install e-Gnomes, the "Internet of Things" is not coming to my garden.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I do; my wife
Who doesn't?
Rimshot!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'm an embedded developer and also have a hobby garden. So when things got cheap enough I got really excited about building a contraption to monitor moisture, ph, amount of sun and to adjust fertilizer and water levels accordingly. Then I realized that for hobby gardeners this really defeats the purpose. We garden for fun, and at least for me, I don't like bringing technology to things that don't need it.
On the other hand, those guys out in colorado growing pot will love this kind of thing.
I've been using this wonderful device for controlling drip irrigation:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
I used something kind of like that for about two weeks, until one day I came home to find that the mechanism had spontaneously exploded* sometime hours before, and my garden had turned into a small swamp-like biome.
Now I just mulch properly and water in the morning/evening like I used to; the mulch makes all the difference in the world.
* Caveat, the model was one of those super-cheap ones from Harbor Freight, so I should have expected catastrophic failure.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
http://modernfarmer.com/2013/0...
Unfortunately, they're only focusing on lettuce for right now.
Personally, I just use a hydroponics system, so I don't have to worry about significant weed problems. (algae and insect problems, yes, but not weeds).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
WEEDING a garden is hard. Got a robot for that? Didn't think so.
That's actually one of the interesting things I'd expect robotics to solve in the decades to come. There's quite a few things a robot should be able to do to weed - electrocution and precise microwave heating (mm waves?) come to one's mind.
Ezekiel 23:20
I, for one, don't do his wife (I hope).
Ezekiel 23:20
Does your solution account for weather forecast? Because watering the lawn 12 hours before it is going to rain seems like a bit of a waste.
I'd love to have a timer that was smart enough to read the local weather forecast, and make decisions. I'd also love to have a timer where I could walk the zones in my garden periodically and using my smart phone/tablet and increase/decrease the amount of watering duration for the zone.
what if I get stuck in a walled garden?
Speaking as a Northern Californian. If I didn't waste the water they would just send it to LA.
Better here then there.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A bowl full of beer?
They aren't choosy, even cereal malt beverages work. Slugs will even drink Coors or Corona.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
reminds me of incident The Algonquin Round Table, a bunch of writers, critics, actors, comedians, etc. that met at lunch daily at Algonquin Hotel in NYC from 1919 to 1929:
(friend feeling top of playwright Marc Connelly's bald head) ""Marc, your head feels as smooth as my wife's ass."
Marc Connelly (feeling top of his own head): "why so it does, so it does"
Move to California. The laws are much better here.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They've figured out one more gadget mobile way to extract unnecessary money from your wallet. You'll feel lighter, slimmer and faster without all that money clogging up your bank account!
Handling water may possibly become my first Arduino or RaspPi project, if I can get through my newbie ignorance, and learn some new tricks as an old dog.
We have flood irrigation that comes in from an acequia every couple weeks (used to be every week, but times are changing) at an irregular rate at irregular time-of-day. (You can't deal with this, just using timers, and the amount of water pressure is tiny compared to what you usually have on a typical garden hose, so lots of cheap ubiquitous gadgets don't work here.) I leave a floodgate open (i.e. remove a coffee can from the end of a tube), go to work, go back home for lunch, go back to work, go home at end of day. For various reasons that you can probably imagine, it's bad to leave the floodgate open after we have collected a certain amount of water. Things work out fine if it happens to finish at lunch time (or if it's so slow that it hasn't finished until end of day), but otherwise, someone has to leave their workplace and go home to deal with it.
That is lame, in a way that really does (slightly) matter.
Thus I'm tempted to either build a sensor (or just cheeze out with a webcam, though that's less geeky) and some kind of remote-controllable motorized floodgate.
AFAICT nobody sells anything for this; it's up to me. As it happens, there are lots of guides online for building this kind of stuff, but they're all within the context of Dwarf Fortress! Yeah, right, as if I want a gate that'll remain stuck open just because there's a butterfly or elephant carcass in the way.
Lower tech solution: find retired neighbor to do it, in exchange for beer or something. This is actually the cheapest/smartest way to do, but rubs me the wrong way. I'm sure you all understand.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
WEEDING a garden is hard. Got a robot for that? Didn't think so.
That's actually one of the interesting things I'd expect robotics to solve in the decades to come. There's quite a few things a robot should be able to do to weed - electrocution and precise microwave heating (mm waves?) come to one's mind.
It's amazing what you can do with a little corkscrew device.
The reason I have a garden is to have a place where I can go outside and putter around with living things. The pace at which things happen in the garden is very slow and relaxing. The needs of the plants are simple.
The most stressful thing that happens in my garden is the annual competition between me and the birds to see who will get the grapes and blueberries. Really though I don't mind much if the birds get some. They are enjoyable to have around in their own way.
The last thing I want is some sort of automation that takes away from this process and replaces it with the technology that I am trying to escape from with my hobby.
That's all I need, fucking ads while picking my tomatoes.
Perfectly fine in theory but probably sufficiently mechanically complicated so as to be impractical for low-cost robotics.
Ezekiel 23:20
I just read every post (up to this point), and it's the real gardeners who are opposed to the tech solutions.
That's not what gardening is about. You have to get out there and get your hands dirty to enjoy it. I was born with a "green thumb" and can grow almost anything, even plants that are supposed to be outside of my growing zone. But you gotta be out there with 'em to know what they need and when they need it. Too many people over-water, plant in the wrong place, or over-fertilize and then wonder what went wrong.
I even like my weeds. Many of them are edible!
...I think I will continue mowing the grass by myself, rather than wasting twice the time fixing network interfaces, rebooting controllers, changing batteries, etc.
Perfectly fine in theory but probably sufficiently mechanically complicated so as to be impractical for low-cost robotics.
Probably less complicated than chemicals or lasers. All the corkscrew has to do is rotate, Garden Weasel [TM] style. The positioning hardware is probablty going to be virtually identical.
You seriously think the mechanical motivators capable of exerting a sufficient force (what, two dozen pounds? You have to design it for the worst case...) over a potentially long arm and a mechanical design of the mobile robot able to withstand a corresponding moment of force without tipping over are going to make it cheaper than a simple inclusion of a solid-state, high voltage source and a small grip capable of a low resistance contact with the plant stem? For example, since when have powerful servos (and you need a few of them) been cheaper than PC PSUs (and you don't need nowhere nearly that much power)?
Ezekiel 23:20
The fact that my cucumbers aren't on my home network is a source of constant shame and sorrow.
Man, you got some tough weeds where you live! Either that or your soil is like rock!
I was thinking more like if I had robotic garden assistants, they'd be out there every morning rooting out weeds while they were still puny seedlings.
The "dirt" around here is about 1 step up from beach sand. A cheap Radio Shack motor would have enough torque to spin that. A bigger fixed motor driving a flex cable would actually carry the advantage that you could use it to make the carriage more tip-proof. That way you could also use the same basic lightweight arm mechanism without the elaborate stem-grabbing attachment that you're positing.
You don't want to assault the weed stem, anyway. A lot of weeds will grow back from the roots, so uprooting them is usually better. Plus you don't have to contaminate the site with Agent Orange or deal with the fact that lasers don't work very well on underground objects.