Pi customisation

[liam1989]

Hi, hope this is the right place to post?
I purchased a pi and have installed the firmware as per instructions and I can log on to the web browser, make programs etc which is great.
However I’d like to look at customising this a bit (I do have some basic background programming and sql knowledge) but all is really on windows.

For example, if I wanted to add digital moisture sensors to each zone, which files would I need to start looking at? My logic for this would be:
If between hours x and y ( or maybe using a light sensor?) and moisture sensor = on then water for x mins. Then stop the program running for y mins and then recheck the moisture level. Repeat until desired moisture level reached.

I assume this is possible (and that is need digital moisture sensors for ease of doing this) but some guidance as to where to look and tinker would be great!

Thanks to all you guys for making such a great system so far though!!

[Mike]

Instead of modifying the firmware, you could create your own script that interacted with the OSPi through the API. I’ve done this with my moisture sensor setup and it works well. The logic I implemented was very simple – if the moisture level was below a threshold value, turn the zone on. https://thingspeak.com/channels/239044

[liam1989]

This sounds like a great idea. I wasn’t sure what would be the best way to do this. Yours looks like what I’m trying to achieve, have you got a guide as D’Tools how you did this at all?

[Mike]

No, I never documented the final product. I built it 3 years ago now. It’s essentially as I described in this thread https://opensprinkler.com/forums/topic/who-accept-a-challenge-to-write-plugin-with-soil-moisture/ and then I wrote a python script to read the values from my sensor and interact with the OS API. The key lines in the Python script are in this thread https://opensprinkler.com/forums/topic/starting-os-from-data-from-thingspeak/

Mike

[liam1989]

Thanks @Mike, I’ll have to read up a bit more to fully understand if and how you can push / pull data from sensors and how the sensors work as such. I’d also like to try to incorporate that in to the web interface of OSPi, and assume that there is a way to modify this, I’ve just not had the time to get the laptop back out to login to the Pi and find directories etc.

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