A Smart Tech Tool That Will Help Novice Gardeners Kill Fewer Plants

Edyn aims to help gardeners keep tabs on their plants' health with a sensor and accompanying app—a water valve that controls irrigation is also shipping later this summer. The products were designed by Yves Behar of fuseproject. Below, Edyn CEO and founder Jason Aramburu shares his thoughts on the target demographic for intelligent garden tools and what the future of the smart tech holds.
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"The people most excited about Edyn are novice gardeners—people who struggle to keep their plants alive and don’t necessarily have time to do that kind of work. It’s a big monetary and emotional investment to set up a garden. When it fails, people actually get really sad. For them, anything that can help keep the plants alive is really interesting.

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The garden sensor communicates with users' Wi-Fi routers and delivers information on fertilizer quality and sunshine levels to the smartphone app.

A big desire [for those people] was peace of mind, being able to check in on your garden and know that it’s doing okay. The average Edyn user might have a 4' x 4' raised bed or even a window box or potted plants. Most people are growing edibles. For them, they might have 1-3 sensors installed. They are using it to check in and see what’s going on and also know when they need to take action.

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The app contains a database of around 5,000 plants, with information on the ideal growing conditions for each.

Most of the interest is still from early adopters of smart tech. What needs to happen to get the public interested in smart tech is that the technology has to be really easy. A lot of the systems that have come out are difficult to install and set up. Once the projects become much easier to use, we’ll see mass adoption. People want the smart home, but they want it to be easy. People are also very concerned about privacy. We had to spend a lot of time making sure our system was secure."

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According to Aramburu, people spend an average of $300-$400 a year on plants.

Allie Weiss
Into cities, mornings, and Sriracha.

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