Hi Mike and others,
Thank you for your help. I ordered the parts and feel I am so close to finishing Phase I of the project. The following is what I have done so far and have a couple of questions to complete this out. Please help with the questions.
1. Got OS Pi hooked up in place of our old Hunter controller and it is running my daily program without any issues.
2. Got ESP8266 NodeMCU board and got it up and running with VH400 moisture sensor.
3. The NodeMCU is publishing the moisture data to ThingSpeak every hour.
Remaining steps for Phase I – I need to get OS Pi to use the moisture data and make watering changes. Don’t exactly know how to do this. I have one sensor for the whole house and have placed it at the driest location. I made this the last zone that gets watered so that the safe option is to water.
Now the questions:
1. Where should I edit the program to incorporate the VWC data published to ThingSpeak? In OS Sprinkler code – which .py file should I edit after downloading it from GitHub?
2. I want the logic to be If VWC < dryThreshold, run the regular daily program with no changes; If VWC < mediumThreshold and > dryThreshold, run the daily program at 50% time OR 50% water capacity (either is fine) and IF VWC > wetThreshold, don’t run the daily program.
3. I want to activate this logic at the same daily time I have set in the OS Pi schedule. In other words, simply add moisture as an additional data point to the program keeping the schedule/zone etc. the same. How do I achieve this?
I saw the examples link the forums you pointed me to. In that example I see that the manual program is called if sensor reading is < threshold. This is slightly different that what I want to achieve.
4. Also, in the example it appears the manual sprinkler program call is made in the uController code after writing data to ThingSpeak. What is the point of writing the data to ThingSpeak if the uController is going to act on current data it just read.
Thank you so much for all your help and getting me to this point.
Really appreciate it!!