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I just received my OpenSprinkler and am super excited. One of the features I was really excited about was being able to control my garage door opener using the onboard relay without having to get any extra parts. I had read about the plan to possibly remove the relay on the next hardware revision so I was anxious to order before that happened.
Well… I ended up receiving 2.3 and unfortunately there is no sign of the on-board relay. I’m pretty bummed about this but plan to buy a 24vac relay and do it myself. It looks like even the PCB has been updated and the relay contacts are gone. If I’m going to add the relay myself, I’d still like to use the existing firmware control for it. Which pins do I need to hook it up to to make this work?
I should mention that I AM happy that the new revision comes with the atmega1284, which is more future-proof, but it would have been nice to have notice about the switch.
As I looked into the previous relay implementation, I see that it was driven from D6 with a npn driver, so I should try to replicate thay with a 5vdc relay rather than a 24vac relay.
It’s hard to tell for sure by looking at the board, but it doesn’t look like this pin is brought out to any through-hole contacts. Would I need to solder directly to the uC pin?
Ray, can you upload the latest schematics to github? Also, were there any FW changes for this HW rev? Or will it still control this pin if selecting activate relay for a station?
Sorry about the confusion. Because very few users take advantage of the relay, and it’s kind of expensive, we’ve made the decision to remove the relay from all OpenSprinkler hardware (including OS, OSPi, and OSBo).
Also, due to a recent supply chain problem of ATmega644, it turns out that buying ATmega644 ends up costing more than ATmega1284, that’s why we decided to upgrade to ATmega1284 ahead of schedule. I will try to check in the schematic this weekend.
You are right that you can still add your own relay to use the feature. Unfortunately I realized that when removing the relay, I didn’t add the corresponding digital pin to the pin out area. So that microcontroller pin is not mapped out. At this point, your best option is to modify the pin definition (in defines.h) to use any other available pin, and recompile the source code.
So does this mean all new orders will be the updated v2.3 hardware? If so, I think I can hear my credit card calling…
Where are the hardware variations documented. I was sure I saw that listed out previously on the old website.
The only difference between OS 2.3 and 2.2 is that 2.3 uses ATmega1284p and 2.2 uses ATmega644p. Because this upgrade went ahead of plan, we haven’t properly documented the difference yet. At the moment the firmware is the same for both, although 2.3 is clearly has more flash memory space and RAM space for future upgrades. As I said, the main reason we upgraded is that ATmega1284p ends up costing less than ATmega644p.
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