Valves Don’t Open

[Brendan Coupe]

I bought my second OSPi in July 2017 for our new house in Colorado after leaving the original one at our house in California. I am happy to report the original one is still in service and I have been maintaining it for the new owners remotely.

Unlike California, I turn off the sprinklers for the winter in Colorado. I leave the Pi running so that I can keep it up to date.

When I turned the sprinkler water back on a couple of days ago, none of the vales would open. I put a volt meter on the 8 ports and they all read around 50 mV. The power supply is fine (around 30 V) which is obvious since the Pi is running fine.

Before I tried to run the system, I ran a git pull and build to make sure I had the latest software. I keep old versions of the OSPi software before I update it so I was able to role back to previous versions that I know work. I had the same problem with the older versions.

The Pi is up to date and I have not tried roiling it back to the last image I have of the MicroSD card which is about a year old. I may try that but I’m wondering if there is anything I should try before I order a new OSPi board.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi 2B. The Pi is running kernel 6.6.26-v7+.

[Brendan Coupe]

I restored the image I made in March 2023 and everything worked. I did not realize that the rain sensor was active before I restored the RPi image but as soon as the system booted up, the rain sensor was active (happens when it’s cold). It was not active on the system prior to restoring the image. I guess that was the first hint of a problem.

I then restored the recently updated version of the OSPi software, and everything was working correctly. At this point it appears both the hardware and the OSPi software is not the problem.

I ran apt upgrade and dist-upgrade on the RPi. The OSPi still worked.

Kernel when the system did not work: 6.6.26-v7+
Kernel after the restore (from a year ago): 5.15.82-v7+
Kernel after running update: 5.10.103-v7+

I also know that the kernel on a the system running at my old house is 6.1.55-v7+ and if it wasn’t running they would have called me by now.

My next step is to backup the working image and update the kernel to the latest (rpi-update) and see if that causes the problem. This won’t happen for a few days.

Any other ideas?

[lord.hypnos]

I also lost functionality when I updated my kernel to 6.6. I think that these are related issues:
https://www.thegoodpenguin.co.uk/blog/stop-using-sys-class-gpio-its-deprecated/
https://www.domoticz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42141
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=367548

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