# Ideal lawn management software



## Di3soft (Jun 13, 2020)

As I am a programmer, lover of data, and a lawn crazy person. I'm starting to build out lawn care management software. In an ideal world what would be some helpful things you'd like to see?

My current list of features are:

Weather history and forecast
GDD
ET0 
Fert/other tracking and reporting 
PGR tracking and suppression rate

Just trying to get a list going for when the winter time rolls around and I don't have the lawn to take care of.

When this would get finished ( there is no date this would be worked on in spare time for fun ) and if it's not cost prohibitive I would provide any TLF member access to it. Would also be completely open source on GitHub.


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## Thejarrod (Aug 5, 2018)

Probably soil temp too


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## g-man (Jun 15, 2017)

Growth potential
Soil result control charts
Rain/irrigation tracking
KS dollar spot model
Crabgrass gdd model

The biggest challenge will be accurate source of the data (eg. Weather) and all the data storage. The Google sheet log file I share has the formulas for most of this. Also check out the greenkeeperapp since they are doing some of this.


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## Di3soft (Jun 13, 2020)

Thejarrod said:


> Probably soil temp too


Maybe greencast has an api I can check


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## Di3soft (Jun 13, 2020)

g-man said:


> Growth potential
> Soil result control charts
> Rain/irrigation tracking
> KS dollar spot model
> ...


Yea I've used the google sheets log file but I really dislike using spreadsheets. I did modify it to also include irrigation. Weather there are a few apis that are pretty good. Data storage is pretty cheap, gets expensive at scale but that would be a long time away.And yea I've used greenkeeper app, it does most of it already I just wanted a project for the winter.


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## Di3soft (Jun 13, 2020)

@g-man im compiling a list, what do you mean by soil result control charts?


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## g-man (Jun 15, 2017)

We do soil test every year and then we add P or K. A control chart could plot the values for every year and how are they trending.


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## Di3soft (Jun 13, 2020)

essentially a chart with yearly soil test results that you input and it would show you the trends


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## Di3soft (Jun 13, 2020)

Got a quick start on it last night
User creation / User Login - Done
Fertilizer log creation / deletion - Done


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## Di3soft (Jun 13, 2020)

g-man said:


> We do soil test every year and then we add P or K. A control chart could plot the values for every year and how are they trending.


sorry one more quick question as ive only used yard mastery soil test, do you have a sample response for a soil sample that I could pull nutrients measured from? or just tracking NPK would be sufficient to start with?


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## thebmrust (Jun 29, 2020)

Mowing
-height of grass at mow time
Height of Cut
-width & est time to cut area
-bag
-mulch

calculators
-herbicide
-liquid
-granular
Spray volume

Granular settings

Conversions
-liquid vs weight
-ounce/teaspoon/pound of acid application rates for known herbicides

Mapping for soil tests.
Map import/usage
Costs for everything
-equipment
-applications

Calendar
-mowing (avg height of grass vs HOC to next cut) ((can suggest next cut to keep within 1/3 rule & adjust for weather &/or vacation))
-last/next
-ordering
-planning
Countdown/Count up
-seeding
-irrigation season on/off
-last frost/potential frost


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## Di3soft (Jun 13, 2020)

@thebmrust that is a great list! Thank You, wont be all at once, but in steps.


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## Kallgren (Nov 10, 2018)

I've actually thought a bit about this and reached out to a programmer friend a few years ago for a concept I called LawnCut

I've often wanted a utility similar to CAD/CAM software (i.e. Milling a pocket with island avoidance) for calculating optimum cutting patterns based on width of mower(s) in your shed.

Maximizing efficiency as an example.
Front to Back
Right to Left
Diagonal

Additionally utility to monitor equipment use and predictive preventative maintenance planning
Next Oil Change as an example
Spark Plug change
Etc.

And finally the tour de force - a utility to allow you to load you favorite sports team logo onto you virtual yard and have it calculate the pattern required to show your support on the big game day. There is a fantastic book written by the turf superintendent at Fenway Park at our local library with a whole chapter about creating different patterns.


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## sneakbreeze (Sep 2, 2020)

I'm actually working on something similar now. I didn't necessarily plan on sharing it with the community it's more of a personal project but I do have a python script that pulls the previous days weather data from openweathermap (see below) and writes it to an AWS RDBS (MSSQL). I'm happy to share it with you if it would be helpful. I don't have it pulling forecasted weather data yet because I'm not sure what I plan on doing with that, but it could be easily added.

Here is the data that is returned from the script:

Yesterday's date: 2020-11-17
High temp: 56.79
Low temp: 34.86
Humidity: 51.83
Total precip: 0


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## Di3soft (Jun 13, 2020)

@sneakbreeze thanks for the offer man, I already got the weather forecast and history taken care of.


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## pop3dump (Sep 17, 2021)

Di3soft said:


> @sneakbreeze thanks for the offer man, I already got the weather forecast and history taken care of.


Got a repo link? I won't mind helping code since is open source. What languages?


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## Thick n Dense (May 7, 2019)

I would just be careful with the official forecasts and what actually happens. Even in this day and age precipatation and temperatures are off.

My advice is to find a site that records the actual values rather then predicts. Then pull the data only after that day has passed. 
Most sites dont say how they come up with their data. But data integrity is largely important when it comes to irrigation.

Another idea: a question I ask myself often is, "is it too hot to spray a particualr herbicide" ? If not when should spray ?

A cool feature would be some image processing to determine grass height. It would be localized with a micro and some sensor.
Then you could select your height of cut and when to mow, although eventually you should be able to know how much it grows with enough data and statistcs.


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