A built-in sprinkler system is a better way to water a garden than just standing there randomly blasting plants with a hose. And taking that idea one step further, the Droplet turns your sprinklers into intelligent snipers that only water the plants you tell them to using a focused stream — except when rainy weather already has.
When connected to your home’s Wi-Fi network the compact Droplet water cannons can not only be programmed to fire exactly where you target them, you can also program an exhaustively detailed schedule of when they should and shouldn’t blast away.
But the software controlling the sprinklers also has access to detailed weather reports so it knows not to water if there’s strong odds it’s going to rain soon. You can even specify the type of plants and soil it’s watering, and it will adjust its own schedule to account for special needs.
Besides being a much better way to water a garden for the lazy and technologically inclined, the Droplet is also promised to dramatically reduce your water consumption — up to 90 per cent — saving you hundreds of dollars on your water bill every year. Which is great because each Droplet sprinkler head will cost you $US300 once it’s finally available. You can only pre-order through Amazon in the US though, and it doesn’t look like there are any details for overseas availability, so one might have to resort to trickery in these early stages.
So we might actually hold out for generation two that hopefully introduces some motion tracking capabilities to constantly harass the local squirrel population — even if it triples our water bill. [Droplet via Gizmag]