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OpenSprinkler › Forums › Hardware Questions › OpenSprinkler › U500w Ultrasonic Flow Meters
Tagged: Badger, flow meter, U500w, Ultrasonic
I just purchased OpenSprinkler v3.4. I think I have everything sorted except for a flow meter. I have hard water where I live. I’m leaning towards this U500w ultrasonic flow meter so as to avoid buildup of mineral deposits inside the meter. From the picture, I gather the particular model I’m looking at buying has a 3 pin connector I can splice for longer wiring. If anyone has any insight into this style of unit, good, bad, or otherwise I appreciate it.


Do you have a link to the datasheet of this flow meter? If it has 3 wires, we need to figure out what these wires are for (power, ground, signal?) and what type of output (digital, analog?) in order to find out how to connect it to OpenSprinkler.
From the attached PDFs my guess is it uses a Nicor connector wired as follows.
| Wire Color | Function | Notes |
| ———- | ——————– | ————————— |
| Red | Power / Clock (V+) | Supplied by ORION endpoint |
| Black | Ground (V‑ / Common) | Shared common reference |
| Green | Encoder Data | ASCII flow data to endpoint |
The flow meter has an inbuilt 20 year battery. I’m hoping for that reason I won’t have reason to connect the red wire (unless it’s useful to me somehow?).
It seems Badger Meter’s default pulse frequency is 20 Hz and gallons. I’ll tweak the flow pulse rate in Opensprinkler’s menu as necessary so that it matches up with the inbuilt display on the meter itself.
If it really is a Nicor connector, does anyone have any recommendations on where to obtain an extension cable for it to add 5-10M of length? If not, I’m comfortable splicing it myself with gel filled splice connectors.
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