A friend is thinking about doing a startup – I promised to email him my occasional business ideas. I’m posting the rejects here. This is the first. My usual terms apply.

We recently had a landscaper redo our lawn. So we had a law full of dirt that had to be seeded with grass and then watered daily.

We setup 8 sprinklers – every 15 minutes I had to turn one off and the next on (lots of valves and splitters) because we didn’t have enough water pressure to run more than one at a time.

So –

From a single spot an intelligent sprinkler has pan and tilt servos and a nozzle that emits a single tight stream (the opposite of normal sprinklers). The servos drive the sprinkler in a raster pattern to cover any arbitrary shaped pattern of lawn evenly – water goes only where you want it, not where you don’t.

Because it emits one single high-pressure stream, the area it can reach is far larger than a conventional sprinkler.

It’s programmed when you turn on the water and “draw” the outline of the area you want covered by hand, moving the nozzle. After that it’ll keep that area watered as long as you want.

Also it has a timer, so it can run intermittently in any on/off pattern you like.

It’s powered by a little water turbine that drives a generator, which charges a battery.

Update 2024: 8 years later, something very like this is on the market: https://otolawn.com/

They didn’t do the “just move the nozzle to paint the area” thing, instead they use a smartphone. And it’s solar powered; I’m not sure how they get enough energy to run the servos all day from that.

It’s about $350, which seems reasonable given the complexity and volume.