BETTER LIVING THROUGH SMARTER TECHNOLOGY
HOW TO GET SMART IN THE GARDEN
The smart home has well and truly escaped the bounds of its traditional four walls and is taking over your yard
BY ALEX COX
Husqvarna’s higher–end grass– munching bots can easily manage a fairly significant slope.
Those of us lucky enough to have gardens have become intimately attached to them in this past year. The yard has become more than just a patch of grass, it’s a viable room in its own right, with all the modern conveniences we’ve come to expect.
It should come as no surprise that the burgeoning smart home is expanding outward into this new room at pace, ready to offer you smarter garden management, better connectivity, and a host of new kit to tie into your existing routines. If you’re committed to your outdoor space you can even find full–on entertainment rigs ready and raring to annoy your neighbors as you put your feet up on the patio.
GO, GO, ROBO MOW
> Plan a party
Meater+
$99, meater.com
We keep coming back to the smart Meater thermometer here because it’s the best way to get perfectly cooked BBQ food. That said, it does take away the fun of being grill–vigilant, tongs in hand, at all times.
JBL Charge 5
$TBC, jbl.com
JBL’s successor to the Charge 4 will be landing right as we go to press — but if it’s anything like its predecessor you’re in for a weatherproof audio treat. Loud, bassy, perfectly portable, with a battery that lasts.
Nebula Capsule II
$579.99, seenebula.com
Why not beam a movie onto your wall? The Capsule II is battery powered, portable, and capable of focusing a 720p image up to 100–inches across. It’s not super–bright, though, so wait until the sun goes down.
Smart mowers may be the big headline grabbers of the smart garden world, but don’t be so hasty to presume that a robo–mower is a “drop on your lawn and go” solution. There are a lot of factors fighting against automated grass management, not least of which is your lawn itself. Let’s consider the way a Roomba (other vacuum bots are available) navigates inside your home to work out why: they can barely deal with scaling the edge of a rug, can’t even consider stairs, and wouldn’t be too happy with an undulating surface. Vacuum bots use cameras, lasers, and bump sensors to pick out the edges of a room and map it — that is all comparatively easy compared to what a robot is likely to face in your garden. Lawns vary massively, light levels constantly change, and finding the difference between a path, border, and stretch of grass requires advanced smarts, or at least a good memory.