Solar Insolation Monitor for Gardens

I just cleaned out a garden / pit of weeds and I am ready to put down some landscape fabric and mulch.  Pretty boring, yes, because I don't know what plants would do well in the sunlight / shade mix that this garden has.  This sparked an idea.

While others have come up with homemade solutions to measure solar insolation (basically, how much solar energy is hitting a certain spot), I propose an easy to use tool for landscape architects (and eventually homeowners, when they get cheap enough) to use for this purpose.  If this video or the The Garden Continuum's blog posting is any indication, there is not an existing tool that makes this easy for a would-be landscape architect.

Sunlite Tracker

The basic tool would look like a stake topped by a round half dome.  It would be a rough crystal ball, with small solar panels on each face.  The dome and the stake are separable with a quick twist of the dome.  The general notion is that you'd pop any number of the Sunlite Trackers in gardens around a residence to determine how much sunlight an area gets.  Consequently, one can determine with some accuracy what plants with thrive there.

In my conceived usage, the Sunlite Trackers would be set out for a week and then collected by the landscape architect.  The location of all of the domes would be recorded prior to their removal.  The Sunlite Tracker would record every minute, the amount of incoming solar insolation.  The architect would then pop a USB cable into the dome and download the information about the sunlight measured at the location.  It would be uploaded to the web-based service www.sunlite-tracker.com.  There, the data would be compared to sunlight measurements for the nearest weather station, so it can be normalized on a historical basis.  I think you do not want to rely on a week period that could have just been sunnier than normal to base your planting decisions on.

Then the website would display the set of trees/bushes/flowers that would thrive in those light conditions.  The architect could be confident that the plant recommended will be suitable for a given location.  If using enough of Sunlite Trackers, that confidence could be increased even in areas partially shaded by branches above.

Who should do this?

I think the business model could work like this:

• Landscape nursery signs up with Sunlite Tracker, enters all of their stock available.
• Landscape architect checks out some Sunlite Trackers and places in a customer's garden
• Landscape architect retrieves Sunlite Trackers and orders goods from the landscape nursery
• Landscape architect returns Sunlite Trackers to landscape nursery.

The key, then, is for the landscape nursery to see this as a means of expanding their sales and integrating more closely with their professional buyers - the landscape architects.  I think that I have a bit more to learn about the industry, though, before I declare this approach suitable.

One (or more) Step(s) Beyond:

Here are some ideas for extensions to the basic idea presented above (organized from least complex extension to most complex):

• The website should allow the architect to put in other filtering criteria, such as deer resistance and low maintenance.  This seems perhaps obvious, but many wholesalers have simple PDFs (some password protected to keep out retail customers like me).  I'm thinking something like the search page on Plant Select.
• Though a bit of a technological leap, one could make the stake smart and have it measure the acidity and moisture of the soil that it has been staked into.  While it doesn't seem like the acidity measurements need to be repeated over time, the moisture measurements probably should be.  And then the moisture measurements could also be normalized for the rainfall over the recent period.
• Also, set up the trackers to transmit back to the internet automatically with a mesh-based network of collecting and sharing information in the base tracker, all ultimately going to a Master-tracker that will be plugged into the home-owners wi-fi network.  This way, there is only the setup trip and the collection trip (with all of the processing and preparation done outside of the time spent at the home-owner's house).

Update 2013-07-02:

So it turns out that I'm probably just bad at doing research.  Folks have developed boards that will do this.  There are fairly well developed tools out there.  That said, I still don't think that they system has been put together in a way that would be easy and useful for professionals focused on the landscape design (rather than hobbyists or enthusiasts).

It looks as if what is needed most here is probably some calibration methodologies and software.  The "one-wire" setup appears easy to put together in the field and would have sufficient flexibility to cover a large or small garden setup.  The logging functionality exists, the computer interface, the ability to attach multiple sensors at the same time.  Its all there.

Though I'm sure it sounds terrible to a techie, good packaging around these products would make this equipment truly useful.