I’m really enjoying playing around with sprinklers_pi on my pi and OSBo, but have a few questions
1) Is the sprinklers_pi software still being actively maintained? The last commit at https://github.com/rszimm/sprinklers_pi were over a year ago…
2) I work for TI, so of course wanted to use a BeagleBone Black instead of a Pi. I have been helping my neighbor with his OSPi, and it wasn’t until I got my OSBo for Christmas that I realized sprinklers_pi was only setup to run on a pi. I suppose the name should have told me something, but it does also run on arduino 🙂
I have got something working by finding a library to control GPIOs on beagle and wrapping that with the subset of the wiringPi API used by sprinklers_pi. That way, I can just do an #ifdef in a header file and not have to touch almost any other code. I’d like to get this checked in to github for others to use, but am not sure about the best way to do that. I’ve only used github for my own single-commiter projects in the past. Is rszimm still maintaining/granting commit access?
Once I get that committed, I will post something on OSBo forum about sprinklers_pi being available for that platform.
3) The main reason we have been looking into opensprinkler is because of complicated watering restrictions in our city. For example, 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month, which is not really possible on any standard controller. You can’t just set to 14 day interval because sometimes there are 3 weeks between the third Saturday of one month and first Saturday of the next. We were both enticed by the siren song of “google calendar”, but after some initial work to try and and “harden” the google calendar demo that turns on a zone based on a calendar event, we determined that was a losing battle. (With 11 zones and following recommended practice of multiple passes through each zone, do I really want 22 events for each day I can water? ugh. what if I need to update my schedule? What about adjusting for weather conditions?)
We decided it would be better to try and use either the interval or sprinklers_pi applications to setup our watering program and figure out how to trigger the full watering routine using a single google calendar event.
We have landed on sprinklers_pi as it seems much more flexible as far as setting up the type of watering routine I mentioned above, with multiple passes, different runtime for each zone, etc.
I have figured out how to run a schedule from the command line by checking what URL the quick schedule page hits, and confirmed that “curl http://ospi:8080/bin/setQSched?sched=1″, does the trick, so I just need to modify the google calendar demo to execute that rather than turning on a zone directly. However, I am wondering if there is a better API for this available. Maybe one where you can specify the schedule name instead of number? Or at least a way to easily get a map of schedule names to schedule number? That way, the google calendar entry can specify a schedule by name rather than number.
Thanks, rszimm and other contributors for what you have provided so far!