Your local hardware store or garden supply center probably has everything you need to install landscape lighting all around your property. What’s a little less likely is coming out of that situation with fewer holes in your wallet than in your yard. And even then, it’s pretty much guaranteed that any off-the-shelf equipment won’t send you a text message when your landscape lighting isn’t working properly. [Mark]’s landscape lighting system does, though!
Powered by a Raspberry Pi, this landscape lighting system has every feature imaginable. It can turn the lighting on at sunset and turn it off at a set or random time later in the evening. There’s a web interface served from the Pi that allows further user control. The Raspberry Pi also monitors the lighting and can sense when one of the lights burns out. When one does, the Pi uses Twillo to send a text message notification.
There’s not many more features we can imagine packing into a setup like this. Of course, if you don’t have a spare Pi around you can probably manage to get the job done with an ESP8266, or even an old-fashioned Arduino.
What! It doesn’t text at passers by or at the neighbors.
Oh this will be most excellent with free open source: xmpp texting
(and sip simple)
Damn, so what’s this really for? Someone boring corners you at a party and you get the text and can be all “Oh my god, the cedar on the western corner of my property is insufficiently accented, I must rush home immediately!”
Do I care that my garden isn’t lit correctly when I’m not there, was my thought, but at least you came up with an actual use for this.
Thanks John. You are right that the use case for this project is somewhat specialized. In most lawn light applications, there are more than one lawn light. This application will let you know when just one of possibly many (in my case 12 lights) burns out. I don’t usually notice when just one burns out, but the text saves me the trouble of walking my property every night. Although this would be more exercise. :).