Ionic and the Internet of Things: Wise Orchard

Wise Orchard is a smart garden irrigation valve that automatically adjusts its watering schedule to keep plants healthy as the weather changes. Users can monitor their gardens and control watering via a smartphone app built with Ionic 2.

Wise Orchard’s system was designed to allow users to take a hands-off approach when it comes to watering garden plants, while enabling them to watch over their gardens and manage irrigation from their smartphones, anytime, anywhere. Wise Orchard automatically pulls local weather data from multiple weather forecast services and weather stations, in order to create a personalized watering plan in real time. It takes the guesswork out of the equation when it comes to watering, helping save money and conserving water.

“The Wise Orchard app connects to our online service to configure the user’s irrigation schedule and monitor past and future watering, manage alerts, and so on,” says Wise Orchard founder Alvaro Salmador. “Some of our target users are gardeners and DIY people who like to make sure their plants are in top shape, but there are also people who want a hands-free approach by using a device that will make sure they don’t need to be on top of things.”

Salmador’s team looked at several multi-platform mobile development frameworks and chose Ionic 2 after gathering information about all of their options.

“We took advantage of Ionic’s components to build our app very quickly,” says Salmador. “We’ve used maybe 80% of Ionic’s components, so… a lot of them.”

The team used ng2-charts (Chart.js for Angular2) to present the user with graphs of information about the user’s watering history and forecasted watering.

“We’ve also made extensive use of Cordova plugins,” says Salmador. “We needed native code to connect to our device via Wi-Fi for initial set-up (the hotspot plugin), and we also used the geolocation plugin, the inappbrowser plugin for help pages, and the native toast plugin, among others. Most of the plugins used are available in Ionic 2 through the Ionic Native wrappers, which made integration very easy. And we only had to modify native code in one plugin.”

The team found that using Ionic saved them time and resources.

“We wanted to reduce the resources we would need to dedicate to maintain and improve our client-facing software,” explains Salmador. “Maintaining different native applications for different platforms was out of the question, as long as a good enough alternative existed. The benefits have been tremendous, since we have managed to do much more with less work. Even if we had just developed one app for one platform, doing it with Ionic would have been faster than going native.”

Wise Orchard’s mobile app is available as a web app, iOS app, and Android app.

“Our users are really happy with our Wise Orchard water valve and the app,” says Salmador. “If you have a garden, you should totally get one.”