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I need help with the Monthly Adjust Plugin. It works on all zones. This is a bit of a problem. I have the adjustments set for Tall Fescue Grass we have here in the Carolinas. This is just what grass needs. Some of my zones water roses and other plants. The grass monthly curve does not suit them at all. What is needed is to be able to have the monthly adjust plugin disabled on certain select zones. Can this be done? If so, how?
While we are looking at this, it would be nice to have the ability to do finer adjustments based on additional sensors. For example, I notice that a section of lawn gets a lot of shade in the winter, but not in the summer. I’m toying with the idea of setting up a security camera system that would be able to see the amount of sunlight on the lawn, and adjust the time on that zone by the amount of sunlight falling on the lawn. Or looking at the color of the lawn to detect whether it needs more water or not.
Lots of possibilities for fine-tuning the zone; it would be nice to have the tools to plug in different ideas and see how they work.
And I sure would like to carry over the Arduino version’s “Program” logic to the OSPI. I was very happy with the Arduino Program capability, and was hoping to move over to the OSPI version. But I’m not sure I will be able to use the OSPI version for “production” use with the current OSPI program logic. Maybe I don’t understand it, but it’s just too complicated to set up 22 zones and 22 start times individually on a grid of 7 days.
It would be nice to have compatibility between the OSPI and Arduino programs so that we could export configurations from one and import to another. We could save these configurations so that we could look back and see what was used in the past, and what monthly adjustments were applied with what results. So, the log data becomes important, as well.
If we split into a new approach for monthly adjust for each version, then we have to reinvent all the neat things we can do with smarter irrigation monitoring for each version.
It is not just the amount of sunlight hit the lawn that counts, although this is very important. Attached is a link to a pdf file from the North Carolina State University explaining turfgrass watering needs http://www.turffiles.ncsu.edu/PDFFiles/000851/ag661.pdf . I realize that you may not live in the Carolinas or, indeed have turfgrass (Tall Fescue in my case). What it does show is a nice set of numbers and an explanation of how to look at soil water retention.
Your original question brings up some interesting possibilities.
the monthly adjust plugin was originally written as a quick example plugin when the plugin system was first introduced. It adjusts a variable that controls the amount of time each zone runs on a global basis.
I think it would be fairly easy to modify the plugin to control a single zone. If your turf’s schedule is in it’s own program, the modified plugin could adjust the irrigation time for that program on a monthly basis.
Let me think about it a bit more.
EDIT:
We have been testing a new feature that can cause a plugin to run a function when an event occurs in the main program including when zones are turned on or off. A plugin could check if a particular zone has been turned on and adjust the irrigation time for that zone (I think).
Dan
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