Remote HTTP – 3 Master Valves, 3 Flow Meters, 3 Controllers …

[Transformer]

Hoping that some kind soul here can confirm the suitability of OpenSprinkler OS30 for my purposes.

I will need 3 master valves, 3 flow meters, and 3 controllers to water my ¼ acre block with dripperlines. Each location has a different water connection point. The master controller will have 8 zones, while the remote HTTP controllers will each have 4 zones. The objective is to water each zone, sequentially.

1. Given the master controller can only accomodate 2 master valves, how would I arrange it so that each of the master valves at the remote locations work as intended?

2. Would the flow meters at each remote location be supported and send push notifications to me in the event of a faulty valve or a burst pipe?

3. Will OpenSprinkler allow me sequentially mist my garden between noon and 5pm for 3 minutes, 10 times per hour, by turning on a dedicated zone at each location when the temperature is forecasted to reach 100 degrees? Or, would it be best to use IFTTT to trigger this action?

4. I live in Adelaide, Australia, close enough to an airport and a Bureau of Meteorology weather station. Am I likely to get reliable weather data without Wunderground?

5. Would ethernet from power line adapters attached to each controller work equally as well as a strong Wi-Fi network? (Wi-Fi seems to be more prone to drop-outs from what I read here.)

[Ray]

1. While the built-in support for master zones only handles 2 masters, you can always achieve similar effects by manually schedule master zones. Specifically, OpenSprinkler supports ‘parallel zones’, so if you need 3 master zones, you can just set those three zones as ‘parallel’ (i.e. turn off ‘sequential’ flag), then manually schedule each in a program with other zones. This is not as convenient as automatic scheduling of master zones as the two built-in ones do, but it does allow you to achieve more than 2 master zones.

2. Each main controller only supports 1 flow meter at the moment (while there are two sensor ports, only Sensor 1 port supports flow sensor). If you want 3 independent flow meters, you will need 3 main controllers.

3. OpenSprinkler support sequential zone operations. Yes it can work with IFTTT to trigger an action when temperature forecast is above some threshold. This can be done by setting up an IFTTT applet, where the trigger is temperature condition, action is a webhook command sent to OpenSprinkler, you can use the ‘run a program’ API to trigger a specific program to run when the temperature condition is met.

4. By default we use DarkSky weather data. You can check DarkSky website for weather data reliability near your location.

5. OpenSprinkler 3 now supports both WiFi and wired Ethernet. If you have powerline Ethernet adapter, you can surely use wired Ethernet on OpenSprinkler.

[Transformer]

Thanks Ray.

[Author]

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