I wanted to provide a small update in that I’ve fixed a couple of minor bugs (the software didn’t handle abbreviated month names – a problem that wasn’t seen in May.)
However, all told the main algorithm is running great – it’s watering correctly based on desired in/week, correctly handling rain amounts, and overall is keeping my lawn alive with what I think is minimal water.
Next up on my list of improvements:
– Get drip irrigation support working (gal/hour instead of in/min)
– Get metric weather data from wunderground working properly
– Ability to pull point forecast data from NWS and suspend watering if forecast precipitation chance > than a specified chance over the next 24 (or 12?) hours.
However, I’m also looking at DanTripps ETO simulation to determine if that is appreciable better. I suspect it is, but I haven’t had time to prove it. I did prove out that in time of zero rain, the amount of irrigation used by both methods are the same – that’s a good “upper bound” test, but now I have to simulate rainfall and see if ETO ends up watering more efficiently.