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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).
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!
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.
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.
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
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"
I'm pretty sure most kids know the difference between a weed and a flower... Flowers don't come in little baggies or paper bags...
Manuals are your last resort only
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!