Hi Mike,
The wireless Toro model I have is just a relay with normally open and normally closed contacts available. No readout or display. It has a sensitivity adjustment from 1/8″ to 1″ of rain. I was testing the web interface coding by manually opening and closing my input line. We haven’t actually had any rain yet here in the Minneapolis area, so I don’t know how it will work in real life. Maybe some rain forecast for later today. I’ll let you know how it works; I currently have the sensitivity set to 1/4″.
The Hunter rain sensor on my old irrigation controller was a similar design. It has been reliable in sensing rain for quite a few years until last fall when the weather turned cooler. I think the battery in the transmitter is wearing out. The battery on the Hunter unit is not replaceable, they make you buy a whole new unit. The Toro unit uses a standard replaceable battery, that’s why I selected it. I hope I have better luck with sensing than you did 🙂
Thanks for your note about the placement of the getRainState() call. I’ll move it to the start of the loop.
Thanks for adding some logic to use the rain sensor. It looks like it would be applied globally at this point. I’ll wait for your next release to update my system with all those changes to make sure they are in the right places.
I had referred to the idea of “rain sensor per program”, but you’re right, rain sensor input per station would would be a better way to describe it. In my case I have 4 stations for my lawn that I want to obey the rain sensor, and two drip irrigation stations that I do not. One is for window boxes, and the other is for potted plants on the deck. We have to use odd/even for lawn watering in our city, but the window boxes and deck plants get watered every day. They dry out quickly and some are sheltered from the rain. I’d be happy to work with you on getting per station rain sensing working.
This project has been my first real exposure to Python, so it has been a lot of fun. I’m really impressed with the functionality of the GPIO library. Thanks for all your help!