OSPI and zone expansion board

[olafsvengard]

Quick question. I just got the Opensprinklerpi up and running and am looking to add the zone expansion board. on connection and/or post reboot it is not looking like it is associating. Does this log anywhere in /var/log so I can see it connecting ? I am not seeing the addition in the either program

Thank you

[Ray]

You need to set the number of zone expansion board in the Options. It defaults to zero. Once you set the number of zone expansion boards, you should see, on the home screen, a total of 16 stations instead of 8.

[Kuson]

Ray related to the Expansion Board, how far can I have the expansion board from the unit? I want to attach 3 valves to the primary unit, and from another location r40 ‘meters away, connect 3 more valves. What’s the theoretical max distance I can have the expansion board located? Is there any other more eloquent way to do this aside from getting another raspberry pi and opensprinklerpi set? Thanks 😉

[Ray]

This is a commonly asked question, and the short answer is that try to keep the expansion boards close to the main controller, and extend the wires to the valves. The wires to the valves can run as long as hundreds of feet; the wires from the expansion board to the main controller should be kept short because they carry logic-level signals and are prone to signal interferences. That being said, I’ve honestly never done scientific tests to see how far the expansion wires can go. Chances are they can probably still run pretty far (for example, you can make a long expansion cable yourself by modifying an Ethernet cable). The concern is that during bad weather such as thunderstorms this may become unreliable. The better solution is to use encoded signals, but that will require some significant change of the expansion board design.

[Kuson]

Thanks very much Ray 🙂

[Author]

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