Pre buy questions

[redheadedrod]

I have some quick questions.

While I am a software engineer I am strapped for tine so am looking for a mature solution.

I have a couple RPI 2B boards and a 3 board.

My expectation is to mount the RPI separately and connect the two with a ribbon cable.

So for hardware questions. If I use a ribbon cable and snip the 5+ lines but leave the rest this should be sufficient?

My expectation is to connect the RPI to the 7″ screen and use the available default case for that combination and power the unit from a RPI supply. The OpenSprinkler board would be powered by the 24 VAC power supply from the current sprinkler system.

The main reason for wanting to do this is so I can provide a local screen to control the sprinkler. With the current software available would the best way to do this be to open up a web browser to the web server on the RPI?

If this is all that it is used for I am assuming it would be a waste to use the RPI 3 that I have especially having 2 of the 2B RPI.

Last question. Can the different zones be controlled seperately? With our yard due to when the sun hits a portion of the yard we may want to run 1 section 2 times a night, 3 nights a week, another zone every night 3 different times, and have zones we only want to manually turn on and off (Due to vehicles parking in the area and not wanting to spray them. ) This is the main reason for wanting to do this and replace the current unit that uses push pins to set the schedule.

I am also assuming I can use a different port to control the unit since I already have computers forwarding the 80 and 8080 ports for other things. I do have Android devices I could connect to this both in the house and away from home.

Thanks!

Rodney

[Ray]

“So for hardware questions. If I use a ribbon cable and snip the 5+ lines but leave the rest this should be sufficient?
Yes that’s fine. Just be careful with the wiring. The current OSPi uses the design where RPi plugs directly into the female pin headers on OSPi board. As long as you follow the same wiring, you can use ribbon cables to connect the two without plugging them into each other.

Another option is to make use of the pinouts on OSPi: at the top edge of the OSPi board. all 2×20 pins of RPi are mapped out. So you can solder pin headers there and connect other components to whatever GPIO pins you need.

“Can the different zones be controlled seperately? ”

I am not entirely sure what you mean. At least you can set up multiple programs if you have a fairly complex watering schedule.

About port: yes you can change the port to other than 80 or 8080.

[Author]

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