- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
I have the Raspberry Pi version of Dan’s interval program and Samer’s interface software running on a Ubuntu laptop.
It works great with no modifications needed. Of course no hardware is defined or available for this configuration.
Is OSBee planned to have a USB nRF24L01 dongle for using a laptop or always-on Ubuntu server as the host?
I would like to add data from WeeWX to the watering schedule adjustment possibilities as my Python skills improve.Yes the long-term plan is to have OSPi / OSBo to interface with nRF24L01 in order to control OSBee. There are some design decisions I haven’t figured out yet. The most likely plan is to release a USB gadget (like the dongle you mentioned) which can plug into a computer / Pi / Bone and have software send control commands. I designed prototype of this a couple months ago (calling it USB RF toy currently), and I will blog about it soon.
Extending battery life on the OSBee will require powering off the radio and putting the AVR into a sleep mode most of the time.
On a project I built a few years ago, I had the mains-powered host send a heartbeat every two seconds. The battery powered AVR remote device had a 32khz crystal for a RTC function. The first time the remote device read the heartbeat through the radio, it would zero it’s internal counter/timer to only wake up, power up the radio, and listen for commands during a 10 mS window every two seconds. This control scheme made a huge difference in battery life.I’ve wired up a nRF24L01 directly to the expansion connector of a Raspberry Pi. It does not use any of the pins that OSPi uses, so no coflicts there. I’ve also tested basic one-way communication to a remote atmega168 with another nRF24L01. So far so good.
I use the wiringPi library and a bit-bang SPI communication routine on the Pi written in C.
Now for my question to Dan and Ray. Have you defined the radio data payload structure yet? Sending [zone_num,seconds_on] from the host to the remote for immediate execution would seem to be the minimum. Is the OSBee going to have multiple zones and inputs as well as outputs?
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.