Custom actions for extreme weather events

[paravis]

Hello everybody,

Not sure if this has been brought up yet, but are there any plans to add “weather event actions”?

For example, if the forecasted low for the night will be <32ºF, I would like to run a special schedule for all my drip systems (i.e., drip for 3 minutes, soak for 15, drip for 3, soak for 15, etc.) 90 minutes before sunset, in order to provide for a slightly warmer temperature due to the water evaporation. By design (with weather adjustment), OS will generally water much less during the cold winter months. So this could be a nice complement to the standard adjustments.

For heat-related events, OS pretty much has that built into the water level adjustment (same with rain), but it would also be very nice to have an action (for example) if the outside temperature hits >110ºF, to run all drip systems for an emergency watering (same as the above for freezing temps). Or to schedule a sprinkler irrigation immediately after sunset to get all the plants back to being happy after a long hard day of getting beat down.

We have a Meteobridge PRO that is programmable for weather events, and can send HTTP requests. So we can already do this type of function using the OpenSprinkler API, but it is really not as convenient to use as the OS interface. For now, this is what we will be doing. But for the future, I’d love to see some type of weather event irrigation actions built into OS.

Anyway, last winter and this recent summer were devastating for our previous landscaping. It came with the house, but my goodness, this recent summer destroyed what was left of it after the previous winter did a solid job of its own killing off some of the trees/plants. We had a completely new front landscape put in this fall, and I sure don’t want to see that one go down the drain!! 🙂

Thanks!
~Laz

[Ray]

It looks like this would need a customized weather script, which can be done but will require writing some Python script.

Another possibility is to make use of the IFTTT support: requests like “if the forecasted low for the night will be <32ºF, water program xxx" can be done using IFTTT (using the Maker channel feature). Take a look at this blog post to see how to make OpenSprinkler work with IFTTT:
https://opensprinkler.com/ifttt-with-opensprinkler-and-opengarage/

To clarify: OpenSprinkler firmware 2.1.7 supports IFTTT notifications (i.e. if some OpenSprinkler events happened, send notifications); whereas what you want is the other way around: if some events (like weather events) happened, send requests to OpenSprinkler to trigger certain programs to run. The former requires upgrading to firmware 2.1.7 while the latter works on any firmware version.

[paravis]

Oh great, I didn’t even think of using the IFTTT! I thought it only worked with Alexa and those things ha ha ha.

I am definitely going to check that out. Thanks, Ray!

(And as a side note, I really need to learn Python!)

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