A smart irrigation controller turns the tables on the thief

From GPS Daily, a story about a theft of a monitoring gadget: A Rain Master Eagle-i Irrigation Controller recently stolen out of a housing development just outside of Tucson traveled nearly 80 miles before rescuing itself. The smart controller is now back in place on the wall where it was originally pinched. 'The thieves were run over by technology and they had no idea what hit them," said Jim Sieminski, Chief Engineer at Rain Master, about the incident.

'In this day and age, something that may look passive like an irrigation controller may not be so passive. The thieves didn't realize they were removing equipment that features 2-way wireless communications via the Internet."

Last November, a Maintenance Supervisor working for The Groundskeeper, a commercial landscape management company, received an error message from one of the 16 Rain Master Eagle-i controllers spread across Continental Ranch, a housing development in the Tucson suburb of Marana, Arizona. … A Groundskeeper irrigation technician sent to the site discovered that the piece of equipment, worth several thousand dollars, had disappeared.

Three weeks later, the unexpected happened. The Maintenance Supervisor noticed a signal coming in from the stolen controller. 'He thought it was kind of odd that it was up and running," said Killmer. 'Whoever had stolen it had plugged it back in."

…'The 2-way is what sets the Rain Master Controller apart from its competitors," explains Johnson. 'With the 1-way systems, a message can be sent to the controller, but there's no way for the controller to send a message back. With Rain Master, the unit confirms back that it received the message - that's how we were able to track it."….

"It's 10:00 pm, Tucson -- do you know where your irrigation controllers are?" Photo of Tucson at night by "Zereshk," Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2