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I have been looking at open sprinkler for some time for a system that has 40 zones. I see that the latest micro version now supports enough zones so now my question is which one. I was looking at the Raspberry pi version but hadn’t seen the micro upgrade. I would like a local status display and control for use by maintenance people, future owners of the house, etc. and to make it easy to use for tech challenged people. But I would also like an internet connection. I am thinking a micro board with a pi may be the way to go. Has anyone added buttons and display to the pi? Which is more straight forward to get going. I have a bit of linux experience including compiling programs and such but am far from an expert. After I get the basic system going I want to add valves for two sources of water – I have a creek and pump I use for low flow zones and some more automation links.
Check this out…
Display attached to the Pi with switches for service people
Regarding setup, I think they both have pluses and minuses. I believe that there have been more power related issues with the Pi. In this sense, the turnkey version may be better. As I was getting the OSPi set up, it took a lot of time to adapt to the Linux, get SSH set up, etc. A lot of stuff, at least if you aren’t really on top of things. The standalone version is basically plug-and-play. There were more than a few times where I thought about trying to trade out my OSPi for the standalone.
All that said: the OSPi is just plain fun, with lots of options and very rewarding.
Technically it’s pretty straightforward to add LCDs and buttons to OSPi. It will just need to take a few extra GPIO pins. However, the usability design, particularly how to stack everything together and still keep the unit compact, is more tricky. I can’t think of a really elegant design without involving three layers (OSPi, RPi, and display/buttons), and this number of layers would also make the enclosure look really ugly.
Ultimately the plan should be to integrate RPi (or any embedded Linux chip) together with the OSPi board. This way the product will look exactly like the current mcu-based OpenSprinkler but runs embedded Linux internally. I am investigating this option but still pretty far from having the first functioning prototype.
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