Down the road….instead of sequential on/off

[gary]

I’m not really fully sure how the simultaneous vs. sequential is working, but it seems to me that if programs overlap and you have some stations sequential and some simultaneous there will be some confusion in the outcome.

For simultaneous valves in a zone i just wire them together.

I may be wrong for some reason, but I think if someone wants simultaneous valves to open they will always be the same valves open within the same program for the same amount of time (as if they are wired together).

A possible solution would be to create “virtual stations”.   The user would create and name a virtual station and can add real stations to be part of the virtual station.  Then in programming a zone you would see the virtual station in the list of stations and when it runs all real stations that are joined to it would open.

 Of course i know it would also give the preview programming some challenges too.

 

[Ray]

The ‘parallel stations’ are mainly intended for non-sprinkler stations — now that OpenSprinkler supports radio frequency (RF) stations (such as remote power sockets), you can use it to switch landscape lights, or other general-purpose powerline devices with OpenSprinkler. Obviously these stations should not be serialized with sprinkler stations, and should be allows to run in parallel. So the ‘sequential’ station attribute is configurable mainly for that purpose.

[Sean]

I use the parallel station setting for my garden’s drip system. All other stations are set to sequential. The garden is on one schedule and all the others are on another.

On the days that the two schedules overlap, the garden station and one of the others is on at the same time. Or it will be when I turn the water on for the season.

so as not to hijack this thread, I’ll ask about possible issues with overlapping stations elswhere.

[gary]

So it might still make sense to do the virtual stations for what Sean is trying to do.

I guess for the lighting you would want the virtual station to run regardless of what any other stations are doing.

Might be complicated but I guess you could define what a “virtual station” is in stations, i.e. lighting, or water and lighting will run its scheduled time simultaneously regardless of what the water stations are doing (running sequentially).

[Ray]

So are you suggesting that we create ‘virtual stations’ and they are by default parallel? We can certainly do that but I don’t see how it’s fundamentally different from the current ‘sequential’ attribute. You can think of a ‘sequential’ station as a ‘virtual station’.

[Author]

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