Growing a lawn is a sophisticated process that requires diligent watering and preventing people from trampling on your grass all day long.
Ryder from the YouTube channel Ryder Calm Down has a beautiful lawn but struggled to keep others off it, until he invented a smart sprinkler system to scare neighbors away from his lawn.
AI sprinkler preventing passersby from stepping on the grass.
In his neighborhood, most homeowners did not have to worry about locals crossing the lawn in front of their homes. However, after the city dug up most of the stone-paved sidewalks, only leaving a dirt path in front of his house, Ryder replanted grass in the remaining area but was continually hindered by locals walking where the sidewalk used to be.
The solution to this was either he would become a “grumpy old man” yelling at everyone to get off his lawn, or he would build a less grumpy but supposedly “crueler” automated solution. Ryder chose the latter.
Using skills learned while building an AI-assisted device to… praise dogs when they are walked by, Ryder connected a Wyze security camera running a custom program to feed its video stream to a Raspberry Pi, an electronic valve controlling the water flow through the sprinkler, and a YOLOv3 machine learning model capable of detecting and recognizing objects such as dogs and people.
When a target is detected, in this case, a person or dog on Ryder’s front lawn, the electronic valve automatically opens, and the sprinkler activates, actively scaring anyone away from the lawn — or at least anyone who doesn’t want to get wet.
This is not a perfect solution to the problem, but it’s better than erecting an unsightly fence around the newly planted grass, installing ineffective signs, or spending all day sitting on the porch in a rocking chair threatening anyone who passes by.
