Gadgetory

hi I'm Andrew Gebhardt for CNET I'm here today in a residential garden in Louisville Kentucky taking a look at the Eden Garden sensor you place the Eden Garden sensor into the soil near your plants from there it connects to your home's Wi-Fi network and sends you information on soil moisture nutrition temperature humidity and ambient light it uses that information to help you care for your garden and it's specific plants and you can check on its readings via its iOS or Android app excited about this plant sensor for a long time it was designed by yves behar sperm fuse project and it looks beautiful as a whole the hardware of this thing does really well it's very sturdy it was aiming to be the perfect plant sensor and as far as the device itself and the readings it's hitting close to that mark we tested it over the course of two weeks in a potted plant against a calibrated meter and over the course of that time the readings matched up with our own very well so the hardware here is pretty darn good unfortunately the software is really not you know when the app is working at its best it's buzzing sometimes it's unresponsive other times it's straight up freezes text overlaps buttons it's always slow even steady images on the screen will jump around giving it a really unprofessional unfinished feel and unfortunately those are just the annoyances on the surface go deeper than that and you see that the plant database that's in here doesn't actually really inform the data it's giving you or the recommendations that it's populating to try and help you take care of your plants go ahead and add your garden specific plants to Eton's app based garden but it won't actually have any effect on the thresholds in uses to send you care based recommendations at other times the app crashed on me completely apparently my case was an isolated case and doesn't happen often but I added a specific plant that apparently caused a glitch in the system and I couldn't get the app to do any of this eva's checked all the right boxes here the Wi-Fi signal means you can check everything remotely and it measures more criteria than the other smart plant sensors I've tested so it's still showing a lot of promise for the future it's just not ready for the present for more be sure to check out my full review on cnet.com for CNET appliances from Louisville Kentucky I made your part