They gave me a list of items to buy, and loosely assembled the manifold for me so I had a reference for how it went together. They were very helpful, and had a system planned out and quoted for me very quickly. I used my sketch dimension values to accurately scale and dimension the drawings to take to the irrigation people. Sketched Dimensions from the Garden were Automatically Transferred Step 2 – Sourcing the components It felt great to be using it for a real project, even if it was just a home job. Like magic, all the work I had done outside was sitting there waiting for me in my web browser on the laptop! This is where the whole cloud tech thing really shines. Within a very short space of time, I had all the data I needed and I headed back inside and sat down at my laptop. It was surprisingly easy to take a measurement with the tape, and then just tap it onto the plan on the iPad. dwg from AutoCAD to AutoCAD 360, and set out into the garden with iPad in hand. Now walking around the garden with a laptop and a tape measure is not practical, and pencil and paper was breaking the rules, so I uploaded my. I was going to have to take measurements with a tape measure, and annotate the drawing manually. I created a few dimensions in AutoCAD, and realised that the satellite imagery was too distorted to provide enough accuracy. They did need dimensions though, so my scaled AutoCAD drawing was not going to be good enough on it’s own. No way was I giving them some scrappy piece of paper. They seemed very knowledgeable about irrigation components, but they handed me a piece of graph paper, with a 1cm = 1m scale, and told me to sketch my garden on it. I spoke to these guys first, to see what information they’d need to be able to specify a system for me. Here’s the result, with and without the underlay image:Ĭapturing a House and Garden Plan in AutoCAD, using Google Maps Satellite Image

I then inserted that into AutoCAD (desktop to start with,) and got to work scaling, and tracing over it, to get the areas that I wanted. I started by finding my house on Google maps, and taking a screenshot of the satellite image of it. I thought I’d try and be new-age, and use cloud tools and an iPad to get the job done. I could have just taken measurements down on a piece of paper and then drawn it up in AutoCAD…. Step 1 – Creating a digital representation of my garden Having got the system up and running, I thought I’d detail the steps I went through to build the system, to share the process which I found really enjoyable.

This is cool stuff, and exactly the sort of thing that gets me excited about how accessible automation technology is, to just about anybody now. I built the controller myself, for about $100, using completely open-source hardware and software. What I have ended up with, is a completely automated lawn watering system, that has a live web feed from a weather site, that makes adjustments to it’s schedule based on seasonal variations and weather. So the job that was initially going to be one new lawn, became two, and then I decided I wanted irrigation, and that got my imagination going… Irrigation could mean solenoid valves, and solenoid valves would mean electronic control, and electronic control could mean automation…. I mean, this is more landscaping than engineering or other related geekery right? Well you see, I tend to get carried away with things. Now you may be wondering, what on earth this has to do with anything that Design and Motion is all about. I raked out all the existing, dead grass, and got to work (with the help of my folks,) leveling out the soil with a straight-edge, and rolling it until it was almost bowling-green flat. What an awesome machine! So much grunt, and a real workout chasing it around the whole day. The existing lawn was looking a bit sad, so I decided to rip that one up too.įirst step was to hire a big hydraulic rotary hoe, and chew up the dirt a bit. We’ve never been happy with it since we bought the house, and I decided to simplify things a bit and turn one of the flower beds into a new lawn. The project for Christmas 2014 was to tidy up the garden. There are always jobs to do around the house, and it’s nice to get a block of time to make progress, as weekends always seem to go by so fast. Every summer holiday (that’s Christmas time in our part of the world,) I try to spend at least some of the time working on a project of some sort.

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