Announcement: Opensprinkler ET

[ShawnHarte]

I have created and tested a firmware version that can take advantage of ET without the need to manually adjust programs.
The firmware maintains current functionality of OS and adds ET as a weather option. The updated ui can be accessed at ui.veuphoria.com if you choose to use the new firmware.

I have been running everything for about a month now without issue. If you notice something odd please let me know and I will do my best to get it corrected. Thanks.

The new firmware can be found at https://github.com/ShawnHarte/OpenSprinkler-ET
Compiling the firmware is the same as compiling 2.1.6 for 2.1 HW. All changes should be self explanatory in the ui. You will need to use the new ui to access the new features. Please write down any current programs you may have as they will not be able to be imported. The run times for each station will need to be set as the time to apply 1mm of water to the coverage area. Google sprinkler precipitation rate for tips on how to measure those times.

[Ray]

Hi Shawn,

That’s very exciting to hear! Thank you for making such a great contribution. I’ve been following your ET thread, and was thinking when we will be able to integrate your changes to the official firmware. And you just did it. Thanks again. Will be checking it out soon and hopefully integrate it to the master branch quickly.

[ShawnHarte]

Thank you for the consideration, this has been a personal project for me for quite a bit now, I finally decided I’d learned enough to move forward and put something into the wild. A few extra eyeballs on this project would be fantastic. A little sprucing up of the code should help make it something everyone could use.
I tell everyone I know about OS, and they all think it’s a pretty incredible product. Keep up the hard work and know that I, at the very least, appreciate your efforts and dedication.
If there is anything you require from me, I will do my best to help out, just please realize summer is incredibly busy for me in the landscaping and irrigation business.

[richpuch]

Shawn,

Thanks for sharing…really excited to try it out. I tried to do the build and get the following:

./build.sh ospi
Building OpenSprinkler…
main.cpp: In function âvoid do_loop()â:
main.cpp:416:78: error: âminâ was not declared in this scope
main.cpp:450:79: error: âminâ was not declared in this scope
Done!

I did a git clone and tried from the downloaded zip and get the same error. As you can tell…I’m no coder :).

Any ideas?

Thanks
Rich

[ShawnHarte]

Okay you must be doing a build for ospi, I had no idea the basic math (min and max) functions were not available to the pi?! Let me do a bit of research and I’ll get back to you later today or tomorrow. Probably just need to do something simple like add an include for some math library, or change min() to math.min()…
If anyone has ospi experience your help here would be appreciated.

[ShawnHarte]

Well alright, I changed it to a ternary operator, name isn’t really all that important. The important part is it should work for you now, sorry it took me so long to respond initially.

Let me know if something doesn’t work for you, I’ll do my best to help…I don’t have a OSPi so please be patient. I don’t forsee other issues, but then again I didn’t know that would be a problem.

[richpuch]

Shawn,

Thanks for the quick response…it compiled nicely and I’m able to get on it. Pretty impressive…I see the ET info when I log in with the updated UI. My Current ETs are 0…but I assume because I just installed and configured it. I’ll let it run for a few cycles…thanks. 🙂

Rich

[ShawnHarte]

You should see the et update after the first weather check. It will also force update at midnight. If something doesn’t update let me know.

[richpuch]

Shawn,

Still have 0 under my current ET. When I do weather diagnistic I get last weather call Thur,07 July 2016 06:17:00 but under successful call I get a -. The rest of the fields are populated, humidity, temp…

My wunderground key is working, the field is green so I assum it has connected.

Any ideas

Rich

[ShawnHarte]

Have you tried resetting the pi, or at least the sprinkler portion of it? If you have…you may need to run a manual program today if you need water. I think I forgot to point the pi version to the right script for weather :(. I’ll get it fixed, but I can’t do it while at work.

Sorry for making a tester out of you, but I don’t have a pi. First, try emailing me your location. Just so I can make sure everything is behaving properly with the script. Or go to WU, put in the location you want to use, and then copy the GPS coordinates to the location on the OS. You should see a change with the first weather call.

Second is checking to see if the program has ET checked, as well as use weather. Both are needed.

My address is Shawn +at+ veuphoria $dot$ com.

Do you use the CA restriction? Make sure you have evapotranspiration, selected as you weather option, no others will work, unless you change the script option /su back to weather.open sprinkler.com.

You can try making a manual call to weather.veuphoria.com/Weather3.py?key=yourWUkey&loc=yourlocation it will send a string back to your browser. It looks like code but is just the results for et0 and et1 and a couple other things all mashed together.

[dpackham]

Did ET ever get included? sounds great

[richpuch]

Dpackham,

I don’t think the guys have implemented ShawnHarte’s code into the main opensprinkler build. I’ve been running ShawnHarte’s version on the raspberry pi since July 2016 and it’s been running fine. Actually been running like a champ. I found one little bug, when selecting ‘flowers and shrubs’ the program won’t save the setting. The benefits of ET outweighs this little flowers and shrubs bug. ShawnHarte did an awesome job, and hopefully Ray and Samer add it some day.

Rich

[dpackham]

it wont even build for me now. bummer sounded really cool

[ShawnHarte]

I had started working on updating to include some of the newest features and I managed to update my main branch. If you discover build issues just go back a version on github and build from that. It still works fine, but as mentioned isn’t perfect and has a few minor issues.
I will probably revert my recent changes and create a test branch to mess with. Sorry I haven’t had time to work in it, I had planned to be done with it weeks ago. If you want to wait just check the dates, if not just go one version back in the history.

[dpackham]

maybe we can get @Ray to include it 🙂

[richpuch]

Shawn,

Tried to compile got a bunch of error messages. Let me know if you want me to be your guinea pig on the raspberry pi.

Rich

[dpackham]

Same here

[Ray]

It’s definitely in my plan to integrate Shawn’s excellent work to the official firmware, it’s just that at the moment I am slammed with other obligations (also we just released OpenSprinkler 3.0 and have been struggling to fulfill orders). The good thing is that summer is coming (I teach at a university and the semester isn’t completely over yet), and I will have a lot more free time once the semester is done.

[dpackham]

Love summer break University as well 🙂

cant wait to test it out. let me know if you need any help/testing

[Anonymous]

ET will manage your water use in a near perfect world, but not by itself as an effective metering tool for irrigation. Decisions that calculate evapotranspiration (ET) to run irrigation, sure, that’s all fine and well and I’m all for it, but without actual water flow being monitored and recorded, any smart controller is dumb as a rock if one of your irrigation valves is stuck on and is running 24-7 and you’re not there to notice it. Or you accidentally cut an irrigation wire when planting a shrub, and your irrigation doesn’t run anymore. Then your lawn dries up and starts to die, but your irrigation controller is still functioning.

Again, all can appear to be fine and well in the ET world and the online controller. Except for one small detail: Nothing is putting water on your lawn/garden. Or you just loss 10k gallons from a main line break.

The flow sensor option in OS 3.0 should definitely address that issue, but there’s no automatic SMS or email alerts in the system so you basically have to catch a ‘no flow’ or ‘high flow’ as soon as you can see it online. Or you’ll see a dead area of lawn/garden, a washout or a pool of running water somewhere it doesn’t belong. A master valve will prevent the high flow but you definitely should monitor ‘no flow’ situations, too.

[ShawnHarte]

If you are running a sprinkler controller without a flow meter then it doesn’t matter how you set up the timers it can over or under water. ET calculations just determine how much one should water, not whether or not your system is damaged. To be completely fair does your toilet have a flow meter, because that could run for days as well, and it has nothing to do with the low flow tank.
Not sure what you believe ET calculations do, but it isn’t there to determine whether or not your system is functioning in proper mechanical fashion. That’s like blaming the oven timer for burning your food because the thermostat doesn’t work.

Buy hey thanks for dragging up this thread to blame it for a problem it wasn’t meant to address. You’re more than welcome to spend your time adding a flow meter, just as I have and the system will do its best to manage your water times for you. But at the end of the day you’ll still be responsible for maintenance, and that has nothing to do with “ET world.”

Side note: Flow sensors can be added to all of the controllers that will run the ET firmware. Since hardware version 2.1 current sensing was included and can be used to determine whether or not a valve is functioning. And in both cases the logging functions would reveal the fault, for which a simple script could be used to send a warning email, as it’s unlikely the software could fix mechanical issues.

[matthew garton]

This sounds really awesome and I would like to use it. I am trying with a Pi and like other have said the build fails. You mention going to a previous verison and that will work. Anyone know how to do this?

[wifi75]

same screenshot?

[ShawnHarte]

I’ve been in and out of the hospital, sorry for not getting back to this sooner. I’ll update the master branch of the fork when I get a chance but for now I have created a new branch at the last point that everything compiled.
It’ll probably be a few weeks but I should have the master caught up with some of the newer features. I know this is the complete backwards way to do it, but, I’ve literally lost my spot on what the heck I was doing. So until I figure out what was going on in my head, I’ll leave the master as it was and you should be able to clone and build the CompilesProperly branch.

Thanks for being patient with me,
Shawn

[Samer]

Sorry to hear about the hospitalization Shawn. Hope everything is well!

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