Initial idea dump for Garden Nexus - always changing and growing:

  • Personalized home garden database: growing conditions, when to plant/seed/transplant (optimized as time passes)
    • Could utilize a large array of Thread-based sensors for this data collection
    • “When should I start this plant? How fast will it grow? Is it getting enough light? How bad did the hurricane effect it?”
  • Daily reporter for both thread/zigbee garden sensors
    • A dashboard of sorts; could possibly be a wall hung console; email push notifications?
  • N-P-K (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium) MTD sensor
    • Able to measure runoff from lawn into local waterways, along with the current soil conditions for the garden
  • Rainwater capture with MTD water valve for drip irrigation for fruit trees
    • Drip irrigation for water-dependent fruit trees during the summer; where it rains briefly everyday, but it’s not sustainable to constantly water multiple times a day due to the heat
  • Natively re-integrate Ambient Weather with SmartThings platform
    • Ambient Weather utilized the old groovy drivers, but they have since been deprecated (link, repo)
    • Local weather and climate modeling to help make better use of garden mesh devices on the platform (i.e. “should you water the garden today or let nature do it?”)
  • The heavily underutilized Zigbee Green Power spec for a garden sensor-suite powered by a solar panel implementation
    • A battery-less device with bidirectional communication with the zigbee router that runs as much as 3 times a day (morning, noon, night)
    • Possible need a workaround for holding the security material in RAM during sleep
  • An Edge-AI camera for disease and pest detection on garden plants, along with a butterfly life cycle tracking implementation for monarch conservation
    • The San Diego Zoo Conversation Technology Lab has done an awesome job, putting something like this together (scrubcam), but there can be a utility for it in a mesh network.
  • Thread and Zigbee Garden Controller: investigation into range of these outdoor devices to the mesh networks and it’s effect on power consumption / connectivity
    • Thread: FTD/Router, Zigbee: Router, make use of a radio co-processor