Announcement: Smart Solenoid. Coming soon!

[pbecchi]

Hi Guys

I am glad to announce a new project Smart Solenoid: //pbecchi48.wixsite.com/SmartSolenoid.
SmartSolenoid is a completely wireless solenoid that can replace the wired one in most of the existing valve’s.It come with adapters for the most common brands : RainBird Hunter Orbit Irritrol Toro…….
It is powered by a small battery that last more than 1 year and is connected to controller programmer via long range Bluetooth!
It can be controlled by OpenSprinker firmware running on ESP 32 or directly by a smartphone.
I have worked on this project on the last 3 month and I am ready now to start a croudfunding campain.

I will be glad to answer all you questions and to consider all your suggestions!

Paolo

[Irri]

Interesting !
Price info, updates?

[pbecchi]

Hi
The prototype board is under test right now!
Everything work as expected and some features like range exceed best expectations!
We have also designed a nice waterproof enclosure and we will be ready to start a IndieGoGo campain very soon planning delivery of first items on may 2018.
We plan to build several type of adapters so that can fit most of existing brands and to deliver also SmartSolenoid with his own valve body!

Price of the Solenoid adapter will be 50€ and Solenoid + valve 60€! We are evaluating selections of US distributors and we expect similar prices (55 and 65$) in North America. We want to keep the price as low as possible ,considering that an average latching solenoid valve cost is 30€ !

Anybody interested should partecipate to the
IndieGoGo coming soon :https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/smart-solenoid/coming_soon
or SmartSolenoid book :https://pbecchi48.wixsite.com/smartsolenoid/perks
surveys selecting the type of SmartSolenoid and the quantity.
This way you can obtain a discount for your crowdfunding perks orders , please select type of perks ( specify the valve brand and type) and number of units.

The OpenSprinkler code running on Esp32 that will connect wireless to SmartSolenoid valves will be OpenSource as well as the Smartphone application.

[Irri]

Thanks for the info!

Can you tell me something about the range ?

[Ray]

Congrats! Seems like a neat product. Though it seems like a competitor for OpenSprinkler, I’m still glad to see it, especially since it uses the OpenSprinkler firmware. After all we care more about the impact of our work and seeing it being useful to users than making a profit out of it.

[pbecchi]

Hi Ray
Thanks for your comments.
I don’t think SmartSolenoid can be considered in any way competitor of your OpenSprinkler products.!
First of all it is Bluetooth and you don’t have any Bluetooth product, second it is not a controller but is a solenoid embedded BLE micro to drive wirelessly a single valve.
So in reality is more an integration to create a new family of controllers that will operate remote valve’s without the need of any wire!
As a matter of fact your firmware ported to Esp32 is already a powerfull controller of valve’s without the need of any additional hardware so changing MCU you could easily transform your OS3.0 controller to become BLE enabled controllers!
You know I have ported OpenSprinkler to Esp32 : Esp32 OpenSprinklerand I can tell you that has been an easy task!

[pbecchi]

Can you tell me something about the range

Thanks, this is a very good question!
There is a widespread believe that Bluetooth range is very short and only useful for nearby communications. This was true for old Bluetooth standards but today this important limitation has been completely removed.
With BLE 4.0 the average range has been extended to 30ft (10 m) and this is what I have used for my first prototype.
I am started testing now BLE 5.0 modules. These brand new module extend the range more than 10x ! This means that now we should have almost 1000ft open air range and a very good range also for underground installations!

[nomennudem]

I’ve been looking for something like this for years.

Are there batteries in solinoids?

Why not lorawan or some other low power RF protocol?

[pbecchi]

Hi

Thanks for your inquiry !

I am working on two HW solutions:
One is based on nRF52 Ble 5.0 with a minimal power consumption: a 200 mAh battery should last for more than one year.This solutions mainly intended for smartphone connections.
Another with a LoRa transeiver and a ATMmega328p to connect SmartSolenoid to a remote (up to 1000mt) Esp32 OpenSprinkler controller. Power consumption will be higher : a 2000mAh battery will be necessary for 4 6 month operations. In this case, a solar rechargeable battery will be probably the best solution .
The 2 different hw boards will fit in the same enclosure and will drive same solenoid coil.

Very soon I will make HW schematics and SW available on GitHub.,..

[pbecchi]

Finally a Smart Solenoid working prototype is born!!

Both HW and SW of this project are fully open source and you can find it on
GitHub.com/pbecchi/SmartSolenoid.

We developed 2 version of Smart Solenoid :
-one based on BLE transceivers (Nrf52832)
-one based on LoRa transceivers (Semtech1278).

SmartSolenoid valve’s can be controlled as a remote wireless stations on OpenSprinkler (Esp32 OpenSprinkler)!

[Author]

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