I’m using the Weathermatic controller with aircard at one controller that serves 2 of our local little league fields but as I mentioned previously in this thread the cost is a bit high. Aside from cost, the software isn’t nearly as solid and useful as Open Sprinkler. For example, Weathermatic reports watering/station activity/status changes ONCE EVERY 24 HRS. That’s really not very useful. I have alerts setup to notify me of certain controller events but none of them will actually alert me the instant the situation occurs in the field. How useful is that? Based on my controller’s log, Weathermatic’s reporting process doesn’t actually occur until ~3:40AM every day. Given this fact, it seems entirely possible that I could have a leak in my system starting at 4:00AM but I won’t be notified of it via email until the next day! Again, how useful is that? At this price point, I would expect a MUCH better reporting solution for people that rely on receiving timely events remotely from their irrigation system.
Another example: If a zone is currently running on my Weathermatic controller, I can’t remotely login and see that. There’s no indication that anything is running using their web dashboard or mobile app. Weird.
Anyway, I thought I would add further info to the discussion using my experience with the Weathermatic controller/air card tech. I don’t know anything about Banyan Water or Hydropoint. I’ll have to research those. I still would really like to see a DIY solution using Open Sprinkler and consumer level hardware and cell phone access in areas that need it. I think it would be a super cool project to create a messaging system to enable cell phone access to/from OS controllers. If we can conquer the connectivity issue, messaging capabilities are endless at that point.