Thanks a lot for that Brandon. Im planning to create a indoor irrigation system for my plants. I live in the middle of a city and have no access to a regular garden hose outlet. So my plan is this:
– Some kind of water reservoir that sits above the plants to make use of gravity to get the water flowing.
– Out of this reservoir I will have several small plastic tubes since the different plants needs different amount of water.
– To be able to stop the water from flowing from the reservoir out the tubes i need some kind of valves on these tubes.
– These valves are operated and powered from the Opensprinkler PI
– And last, i program the Raspberry PI with some kind of schedule (or webinterface). This is the easy part since im a programmer 😉
but as explained, all the valves i found requires pressure from a garden hose to be able to open/close the solenoid valve. Ofc, i could make the water reservoir so big that it creates a pressure just by the weight of the water, but i probably have to talk to the neighbor above to make that happen 🙂
So thats why i started talking about pumps. If im not able to find valves that operates without water-pressure, i need to create that pressure. And yes, I discovered that the pumps draws to much current for the Opensprinkler. But i guess, if a pump is the solution, im better off with a PiFace digital to operate a switch to power the pump on/off. And then maybe use the OpenSprinkler PI to operate valves if the pump creates enough pressure to make them work.
But obviously, i prefer not to use a pump