Garden watering app launched

Features — By admin on December 13, 2011 12:44 pm

The ‘SmartGardens’ app is free and available at the iTunes store. It was designed by Dr Jon Pearce and Associate Professor Adrian Pearce from the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the Melbourne School of Engineering.

“With summer approaching, everyone wants to maintain a healthy garden using the least amount of water possible, so we have developed this app, to let you know how often to water and the duration of watering for your particular location and garden type,” Dr Pearce said.

“Overwatering is the biggest factor in garden water efficiency so the ‘SmartGardens’ schedule is calculated to give your garden the optimum 10 mm dose of water for each area of your garden based on average rainfall patterns. The app also shows you the rainfall in your selected area for the past seven days, allowing you to adjust that schedule based on recent weather events. This watering schedule is a good starting point for determining automatic watering system settings and regular hand-watering patterns,” he said.

The ‘SmartGardens’ app links with the SmartGardenWatering.org.au website, a garden watering advisory tool, initiated by Geoff Connellan and colleagues from the Melbourne School of Land and Environment and developed into a website in collaboration with Dr Pearce.

The website enables gardeners to input their suburb, plant species, various garden conditions and water tank information, for tailored water efficiency planning. By incorporating the SmartGardens app, gardeners also have a mobile watering reminder system.

“For those of us lucky enough to be going away for the holidays, or who are left in charge of watering a friend’s garden over the holidays, the app can tell you what rain has fallen at a different location. That way you can see if recent rain has provided enough water or not,” Dr Pearce said.

This project was funded by the Smart Water Fund and the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society.

More information is available at the Smart Garden Watering site.

Download the free SmartGardenWatering app from the iTunes App Store.

 

Tags: computer science and software engineering, computing and information systems, Melbourne School of Information, MSE, research