New OSPi, questions and ideas

[yellowgecko]

Hi,
I just got my new OSPI and it works fine. It is a great piece of hardware for a great price. and here come the questions:

1. If I want to add an LCD, do I have to use the “hack” of Stanoba or is this implemented in the unified firmware (I run 2.1.6 the latest????)
2. Does the openweathermap also provide data on predictoed rainfall. It does not show in the app, but would be really useful to see.
3. What I would like to have is the following:

One great feature would be that the forecast would be used to delay/avoid watering if rain (above a threshold) is predicted.This seems not to be implemented yet, true?. I saw some posts of Dan who seems to use another firmware and has some code, but my question is, has anyone developed such a system for the unified firmware. My limited understanding of the system is that we would need to have

A. the predicted rainfall for a location in the next 24hours. On their website openweathermap does it 3 hourly max I think)
B. if above a threshold manual rainfall delay is triggered to skip watering
C. if no rainfall is triggered during the predicted interval (checked via rain sensor or web data) then the previously skipped watering programme is repeated

This could be used with Zimmerman or not (basically independent)

4. Currently I use the Zimmerman method but the numbers are all over the place within 2-3 hours from 119% back to 33% and after watering at 50%. So does openweathermap provide all the necessary data (rainfall, humidity and temperature). I left the settings at their default values, but I am not sure that hte algorithm does anything usefull. Today is a very hot day hence tomorrows watering should be above 100%. Is anyone else having difficulties with Zimmerman (I guess a rain sensor is the better option).

Finally a general comment. I really like the openness of the approach, but for a newbie like me it is quite difficult to get on top of the development. All the docs of previous description are maybe no longer valid (earlier discussions on the forum may have been sovled, but there is not really a good way to find something about the history of the project that would allow to “order” all the different approaches etc. For example I can see that there is a plugin page, but those plugin do not work with the unified firmware, is that true?)

Overall as mentioned great work.

If anyone out there would help that would be great

[Ray]

1. If I want to add an LCD, do I have to use the “hack” of Stanoba or is this implemented in the unified firmware (I run 2.1.6 the latest????)

-> The current official firmware does not support LCD. There is a pull request in github that has implemented LCD, which you can try out.

2. Does the openweathermap also provide data on predictoed rainfall. It does not show in the app, but would be really useful to see.

-> I believe it does use predicted rainfall. Samer would be able to answer this question with more certainty.

3. About weather algorithm: we’ve received many suggestions on how to improve the weather algorithm and everyone seems to want to customize it differently. So it’s not clear what’s the best way to fulfill everyone’s need. One of the main reasons of making this a fully open-source project is to give the users the freedom to customize any part of the firmware according to their need. The weather script is also published in the OpenSprinkler github repository. You can customize itm, launch it on your own server, and change the weather script pointer to your own server. In fact, since you have OSPi, you can even implement the weather algorithm within the firmware, without resorting to another server. We have to use a weather server because OS 3.0 does not have the ability to receive and parse complex XML data; also, for non-technical users, it’s convenient to modify the weather algorithm or fix bugs without any need of updating the firmware. For OSPi, however, you do have the ability of running the weather algorithm locally on OSPi.

4. About watering percentage changing too rapidly — yes we are aware of this issue and will attempt to address it in the next firmware, by calculating an average over the past xx hours, instead of merely using the instantaneous numbers. In the past, when we were using WUnderground API, it didn’t use to change so rapidly. Now that we are completely using OpenWeatherMap API, we need to make some adjustments.

The ‘plugins’ are for third-party firmware. The official unified firmware does not support plugins.

[yellowgecko]

Hi Ray,

thanks a lot for the detailed answer. As you may have seen I progressed a bit with my approach using ETO and weather. I fully anticipated it to be an open hardware/source project so really happy with it.

Cheers, Bernd

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