So the whole "smart" thing seems to be trending. Considering building materials and those involved are getting "dumber" it's refreshing. Here's my good, bad and take away from the experience on the device. The rachio is an irrigation controller that hooks up to your wifi and off to the cloud. You easily install it, program zones which include spray head type, slope and soil conditions based on your area. Basically you set what you think it should be watered and with certain options enabled the rachio smart system takes over via syncing up with a local weather station. After a good 3 months of use it is saving thousands of gallons of water and trains your root system to grow deeper so your lawn is more drought resistant (with the help of yourself playing with settings). You can turn your system on/off with your wife in the yard, check stats from your phone and even turn your sprinklers on in say Japan...Freakin awesome. It adjusts how much more or less the grass needs to be watered based on seasonal changes (length of day, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed, etc.) and alerts you to those changes as well as switches off and skips run times when it rains currently and a 48 hour window.
The Good: Excellent system, lawn looks great as long as I stop playing with the settings. Looks better than over watered. Saving thousands of gallons which means payback coming up soon.
The Bad: It's not property specific. What if I want my data to stay on my property? What if some overlord retard woke up took a piss, looked out his window and decided it was to hot and global warming was going to kill us all and decided he was going to turn everyones sprinkler system off...
The Future: I'd like to see soil sensors that could be placed throughout the property that pinged the Rachio device to have my own cloud. This would be more accurate as moisture data would be pulled directly from property and information could be pulled from weather station keeping the "smart" data on the property. It's my data, so I say Mr. cloud...Get off my lawn!
Conclusion: Awesome device, but keep an old school backup due to future of company unknown (servers going down), which means your system goes down and sprinkler commies. Otherwise, great purchase. Buy it!