How do I create a network of OSBees ?

[gr57]

Hi Ray, I have just bought an OSBee after searching lots of other manufacturers looking for something to work with my watering requirements. I have not yet received the OSBee, but it looks like it will do most of what I want.

I have a large property of an acre of gardens around the house. There are multiple zones with more being added. The zones are grouped into remote clusters of up to 3 to be controlled at the cluster. At the moment I have 6 clusters, with a total of 16 zones. I have wifi available to most of them now, but I need to add a wifi repeater to cover the rest of the property as it is undulating. How do I control 6 OSBees to work in a network ? I can only have one valve on at a time due to low water pressure, so each OSBee would have to run through its group of valves, before the next OSBee would operate, etc. Can the IP address of each OSBee be set to a different address, and how would I control the entire network?

My original plan was to use a distributed network of Arduinos with a master and a slave at each node operating the valves through a relay board. I have a power cable and a 5 wire data bus connecting all the nodes, and I planned to use i2c or SPI to connect all the slaves to the master. The other wires are planned to be used for LED lights and fountain pumps.

But this was before I found your OSBee. So now I will just forget about the arduinos, except maybe to use as the master as I have an ethernet and a wifi shield.

What do you think will work best ? I want to be able to use the remote control and monitoring over the internet, so my summer is not spent at home watering the garden.

I appreciate the time and effort to develop this product.

Thanks, Grant.

[Mike]

Couldn’t you set up a master OS/OSPi/OSDC and then make each of the valves on OSBee a remote station? See this thread Then you can use the ‘sequential’ option on all of your remote stations to make sure that only one runs at a time.

Mike

[Ray]

The first thing to note is that the main difference between OSBee and the main OS 3.0 is that OBee is designed for latching solenoid valves while OS 3.0 cannot operate latching solenoid valves. So first make sure latching solenoid valves are what you have, before going all way in to OSBee.

I agree with Mike that you may consider using a master OS system and the HTTP station feature to send commands to OSBees and that way you can have one central controller while the OSBees all become remote valve controllers. The master OS system doesn’t have to be a real OS/OSPi — it can be just a Linux system like a raspberry pi, because it doesn’t need to operate any physical stations, it merely serves as a central scheduler that sends commands to other controllers. And OpenSprinkler firmware can compile and run in any Linux system.

[Author]

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