sprinklers_pi – An alternative sprinkler control program

[Jmgreen7]

I read up the ospi kit and I obviously had a fundamental misunderstanding of what it provided and what I would need. I was interested in just the development on a netduino or raspberry pi board without requiring extra hardware. This may not be possible due to hardware constraints and such. I will continue to read up on this product. I honestly really like it and will likely purchase. Just a question, though. Are there any advantages / disadvantages to open sprinkler vs ospi?

[Ray]

As a quick summary: the OSPi kit provides the 5V power circuitry, shift register and solenoid drivers, RTC, ADC, relay, enclosure and terminal blocks. For software development, an RPi is all you need. But the extra hardware is necessary to control actual sprinkler valves.

For comparisons among the different OS versions, please check this summary by Doug:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=703

[Lefrancais]

Hi Ray & RIch,
I just installed ospi running sprinklers_pi , litterally just finished and I can’t wait to have it run the program tonight!

I have read in this tread that Rich was working on weather adjustment based on forecast, is this something still in the work?
I live in central Florida and we can only run our sprinklers twice a week in summer and once a week in winter, so I run mine early am and late pm on the allowed days.
It would be great if there is a 80% chance of rain today to reduce the % of watering from the am and then if it didn’t rain increase the % at night.
What do you think?
Also I was wondering if I should adjust the base of 70 degrees, 30 % humidity? To do that, do I need to plug my pi to a screen and keyboard or could I do it remotely from a browser?

Again thank you for the great work.

[John_B_Casey]

I am generally very happy with the new OpenSprinkler Pi I just installed and with the sprinklers_pi software. I modified it very slightly to eliminate the pump zone as I have an 8 zone system and needed all the relays.

The one issue I am seeing is “communication failure” messages and “NOT ALLOWED” messages.
I generally use Chrome as my browser. Anyone else seeing this type of issue? Any hint as to the cause?

John

[jwka]

Impressive project!

One question: I just posted a topic on integration of the solution into a home automation project. Would it be a big theme to send out UDP packets? I would want to have:

– watchdog == alive signal with current status (id of controller, state of valves attached/output channels) that allows other devices to see it’s there and mybe request data
– action == any time an action is taken (valve close/open) a package should go out and a waiting period of a few ms shall take place to allow for “re-schedule” or similar command to be sent to the controller
– action done == after the action is taken, a packet shall go out with infos
– request data of the last x hours (actions taken) to allow a device that was switched off to collect “lost” data

More here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=799

Thanks for your work & time!
jwka

[John_B_Casey]

@John_B_Casey wrote:

I am generally very happy with the new OpenSprinkler Pi I just installed and with the sprinklers_pi software. I modified it very slightly to eliminate the pump zone as I have an 8 zone system and needed all the relays.

The one issue I am seeing is “communication failure” messages and “NOT ALLOWED” messages.
I generally use Chrome as my browser. Anyone else seeing this type of issue? Any hint as to the cause?

John

I have done some testing and debugging and it looks like this behavior happens with Chrome on Windows but not with IE or even with Chrome on iOS.
When returning back to the main page the C++ code built in HTTP server tries to do a read to get the requested parameters and this read returns zero bytes.
This causes the built in server to declare ERROR! and return 405 to the JS running on the client.

[kandlg]

I like the sprinklers_pi program, particularly the weather adjustment. Unfortunately I am getting an invalid response from weather underground most checks lately. I am using the 38… ip address and I have verified my API key is still valid. Is this an issue with weather underground or the code?

[KanyonKris]

I had WU errors a while back and it turned out that the weather station I chose was off-line. I switched to ZIP code and no more errors.

[jmechler]

I’m really enjoying playing around with sprinklers_pi on my pi and OSBo, but have a few questions

1) Is the sprinklers_pi software still being actively maintained? The last commit at https://github.com/rszimm/sprinklers_pi were over a year ago…

2) I work for TI, so of course wanted to use a BeagleBone Black instead of a Pi. I have been helping my neighbor with his OSPi, and it wasn’t until I got my OSBo for Christmas that I realized sprinklers_pi was only setup to run on a pi. I suppose the name should have told me something, but it does also run on arduino 🙂

I have got something working by finding a library to control GPIOs on beagle and wrapping that with the subset of the wiringPi API used by sprinklers_pi. That way, I can just do an #ifdef in a header file and not have to touch almost any other code. I’d like to get this checked in to github for others to use, but am not sure about the best way to do that. I’ve only used github for my own single-commiter projects in the past. Is rszimm still maintaining/granting commit access?

Once I get that committed, I will post something on OSBo forum about sprinklers_pi being available for that platform.

3) The main reason we have been looking into opensprinkler is because of complicated watering restrictions in our city. For example, 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month, which is not really possible on any standard controller. You can’t just set to 14 day interval because sometimes there are 3 weeks between the third Saturday of one month and first Saturday of the next. We were both enticed by the siren song of “google calendar”, but after some initial work to try and and “harden” the google calendar demo that turns on a zone based on a calendar event, we determined that was a losing battle. (With 11 zones and following  recommended practice of multiple passes through each zone, do I really want 22 events for each day I can water? ugh. what if I need to update my schedule? What about adjusting for weather conditions?)

We decided it would be better to try and use either the interval or sprinklers_pi applications to setup our watering program and figure out how to trigger the full watering routine using a single google calendar event.

We have landed on sprinklers_pi as it seems much more flexible as far as setting up the type of watering routine I mentioned above, with multiple passes, different runtime for each zone, etc.

I have figured out how to run a schedule from the command line by checking what URL the quick schedule page hits, and confirmed that “curl http://ospi:8080/bin/setQSched?sched=1″, does the trick, so I just need to modify the google calendar demo to execute that rather than turning on a zone directly. However, I am wondering if there is a better API for this available. Maybe one where you can specify the schedule name instead of number? Or at least a way to easily get a map of schedule names to schedule number? That way, the google calendar entry can specify a schedule by name rather than number.

Thanks, rszimm and other contributors for what you have provided so far!

[Ray]

1) Rich is probably the best person to answer this question. You are right that it looks like the github hasn’t been updated for a year.
2) You are right that the sprinklers_pi program relies on wiringPi library, which isn’t available for Beagle yet. Theoretically there is no reason it can’t be made available for Beagle, it just seems that no one has made the effort to do so. If you would like to share your code, you can make a fork and release it under your own github repository I think.

As a side onte, I have been working on a common source for OpenSprinkler, and that will be able to run on both Arduino and Linux-based OpenSprinklers. It does not use wiringPi. Some details are explained here:
https://opensprinkler.com/forums/topic/what-is-the-status-of-zoneprogramming-in-ospi-comparable-to-the-arduino-version/#post-35150

3) The Google Calendar program is provided as a quick demo. When I was working on the Google Calendar demo, I thought it had a lot of potentials, because the calendar interface itself is a front-end, and it’s cross-platform. But then I realized it’s hard to integrate weather-based adjustment, and it loses many of the other features.

I am surprised that you are still able to use it, because last time I tried it didn’t work. I think Google has retired the v2 api, which is what the demo is based on. I haven’t yet figured out how to use the new api. But if you can still manage to get it running, please drop me a note and I’d be interested in knowing. Thanks.

[jmechler]

Ray, I forked your repository, incorporated my changes to ospi_gc.py to support apiv3 (among other enhancements) and issued a pull request to you. I will try and do the same thing for sprinklers_pi.

My longer term vision for the google calendar integration would to be to 1) cache locally and check a few times per day rather than polling every 60 seconds, and 2) use it to trigger a program in sprinklers_pi or the interval program rather than directly control zones.

-Jason

[Ray]

OK, just saw your pull request. That’s great, thanks for making it work with the new Google Calendar API! I will check it out in a couple of days and merge your request. Thanks.

[loop_1]

HI!

i’ve tried to install sprinklers_pi over an emoncms machine but i have some issues…

if i try to see the site the page don’t respond and if i see the log
2015/03/01 10:37:46 Starting v1.0.7..
2015/03/01 10:37:46 Reseting EEPROM
2015/03/01 10:37:46 Prepare Failure (no such table: versions)
2015/03/01 10:37:46 Turning Off All Zones
2015/03/01 10:37:46 Listening on Port 8080
2015/03/01 10:37:46 Turning Off All Zones

i think that there are some problem with sql3lite… anyone have this problem?
any conflict with mysql used by emoncms?

Thanks a lot!

[Michael]

I’d like to say a really big “Thank You” to Richard for writing this (Where is the “donate a beer”-button?). I’m still waiting for my Ospi-Board, but the dry run seems to work fine. I had to change the values in Weather.cpp, though. Naturally the starting values (=100%) of 70°F and 30% humidity won’t apply for most places on earth, but you have to start somewhere. Using those, the sprinkler times went down to 17%, and it hasn’t rained in several days. But that is easily changed and I’ll experiment a bit with that.

[Egidijus Žideckas]

@John_B_Casey wrote:
I am generally very happy with the new OpenSprinkler Pi I just installed and with the sprinklers_pi software. I modified it very slightly to eliminate the pump zone as I have an 8 zone system and needed all the relays.
The one issue I am seeing is “communication failure” messages and “NOT ALLOWED” messages.
I generally use Chrome as my browser. Anyone else seeing this type of issue? Any hint as to the cause?John

I have done some testing and debugging and it looks like this behavior happens with Chrome on Windows but not with IE or even with Chrome on iOS.
When returning back to the main page the C++ code built in HTTP server tries to do a read to get the requested parameters and this read returns zero bytes.
This causes the built in server to declare ERROR! and return 405 to the JS running on the client.

Hi, I think I managed to fix decrease Chrome browser errors,  changes: https://github.com/rszimm/sprinklers_pi/pull/38

I get errors from time to time, but way less frequent

[Michael]

Hi all,

I noticed a small bug with sprinklers_pi: when running a quick schedule, the first station in that schedule (whichever that may be) runs around 30 seconds shorter than it should be. The others run their assigned length.

I don’t know if sprinklers_pi is still actively maintained (would be a shame if it wasn’t) but I still thought I’d mention it.

[jay]

can you use plug in on this one for relay use on a pi?

also i keep getting communication failure everytime i save a setting

[Author]

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