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I just began using OpenSprinker and have a problem with the watering adjustments. I have several nearby weather stations I have tried with the Zimmerman method, but the watering percentage being used is 200% no matter what I configure. I have tried setting the Temp, Rain, and Humidity controls all to 100%, all to 0%, and various values, and the percentage shown is still 200%.
When I click on the forecast on the main page, the conditions for Now include Precip:-999.00in. Is this correct? The next two days are showing the correct forecast and predicted rain in the area.
It appears to be talking to each station I have tried, as the temperature and current conditions change each time I pick a different station. I have the controller using a DHCP reservation from my firewall, and the firewall is set to allow that reserved IP address to go to any address on any port at this time.
Am I missing something in setting up the software? Thanks.
Update- I found another thread here with a URL to try for testing. When I try this:
http://weather.opensprinkler.com/weather1.py?loc=pws:KVALORTO15&key=ed2fb9ad3486c2f8I receive:
&scale=60&restrict=1&tz=32&sunrise=350&sunset=1238&eip=1654875217
but in the software it is now showing 96% water level. Should it be showing 60%?Which firmware version are you using? This is found in the apps about page and if it’s lower than 2.1.5 (1) then likely the issue is a bug discovered in prior firmware versions and the update would fix it.
It is version 2.1.5(1). I had tried restarting it before, but this time I tried a different station and then rebooted and it is now showing the 60% that I would expect on a rainy day. Thanks.
That is odd, if it happens again let us know. Also, on the left side panel is a weather diagnostics button which shows the last successful weather call by the device. Next time if the issue comes up check this date and see if it stopped updating.
Notice because it is raining in your area, the restrict flag is equal to one. We are working on the weather service this weekend and adding more weather sources to help prevent watering while it’s raining, so it’s good to see that working!
The weather diagnostic looks like it is working and last updated about 40 minutes ago. The only thing I am wondering about is in the diagnostic screen it is showing no rain today which is wrong, but the watering percentage has gone down with the rain we received today.
I also use Homeseer and got it talking to OpenSprinkler today to see what I can do with it 🙂 Thanks for the help.
I’m having similar issues. Running 2.1.5. Location: pws:KMAHYANN3. The update call time is current and matches the successful call time, but the precip yesterday seems stuck at 0.71, which was true four days ago. And the watering percentage was stuck at 0% until I rebooted. Now the percentage is 68%, but the precip yesterday is still 0.71 (it didn’t rain at all in the last three days). Any advice most appreciated. Thanks.
Can you specify which hardware you are running? Is it OS, OSPi or OSBo? On OS the firmware has a feature that will automatically restart the controller if last successful weather call is more than 24 hours old. This isn’t done for OSPi and OSBo yet but can be added.
My controller is the OS and seems to be working fine except that it still shows no rain yesterday. I have it set to use pws:KVALORTO10 and I see the watering percentage slowly creeping up since it is warmer and dry today, so it looks fine otherwise.
I also got it working with Homeseer yesterday and will have to see what fun I can have with it, like turn on the sprinklers if I detect motion in the back yard in the middle of the night 🙂
@HFTobeason: I checked your location and it seems wunderground does report 0.71″ precipitation at your location yesterday.
http://api.wunderground.com/api/YOURAPIKEY/yesterday/q/pws:KMAHYANN3.json
just plug in your API key above and you can see that the ‘precipi’ field reports 0.71 (that’s the daily summary). So this is not something we have control over.@HFTobeason: by the way, I forgot to mention that Samer just updated the weather script a couple days ago to use a new node.js based framework. The reason you see the watering level updated after restarting is because the controller (before restarting) is still referring to the old script (because the firmware only performs DNS lookup upon start-up). After restarting, it now references the new script location. In theory the new script should be returning the same watering level as the old one, given that they use the same weather data from wunderground. But this seems to be a case where the result is different. We are digging in to find out the cause of the difference, and will let you know as soon as we find out.
@Ray – Thank you for your replies. I’ve been trying various local WeatherUnderground stations to see if I can find any that deliver reliable current and past day data, but I’ve had very inconsistent results. Is there a recommended method for discovering/using more stable WU feeds (i.e. NWS feeds)?
@HFTobeason – We are actually working with Weather.com’s API now to try and provide more accurate weather results. They have a new API which takes into account computer models if accurate weather data is not present with 4 km blocks. Its really exciting and one of the best parts is we will be providing this without having the user need an API key. We already have most of this complete and will announce more details once it’s all done.
@Samer – I look forward to it!
I’ve found that using icao:KHYA as my Location seems to be delivering more consistent weather results. I really just stumbled upon the whole “icao” thing by accident whilst perusing these forums.
I am having a similar issue all of a sudden. Last night the percentage was at 200%. I’ve never seen that before. I rebooted the OS and it changed to 105%. This morning it again was at 200%, i rebooted and it returned to 107%. Maybe there is a problem with the updated script.
I never really want to see more than 110% anyway, no matter what. Perhaps there can be a max and/or minimum percentage amount setting, so that if the weather calculations return such a large amount (200%) it won’t allow more than 110% (or whatever i set the max to) anyway.
I don’t know if this has anything to do with it but the weather diagnostics show:
Precip yesterday T” (not a typo it has the letter “T”)
Precip Today -999.00″ (again not a typo it shows “-999.00”)@gary: can you specify your location? In general, Precip T” or -999 means Wunderground is reporting invalid data. This is not something we have control over. You can try to use a different weather station to see if it improves.
I’m in 33417 (west palm beach, fl).
Of course i don’t hold OS accountable for the invalid data being returned by Wunderground. However, i mention the values because if an invalid value is returned, i think OS should repoll the wunderground at a greater frequency until it gets a valid value and at least treat invalid precipitation values as “0” (zero) if those invalid values are resulting in the 200% irrigation adjustment. I’m not sure they are the reason for the 200% adjustment, i’ve seen invalid values in the past and never had the 200% adjustment before. It actually shows those invalid values after the reboot of OS changeed the adjustment from 200% to 107% so it is likely the invalid values are ignored by OS and the 200% calculation is due to some other glitch.
It happened again tonight. I checked it at 11PM and the adjustment was 107%. At midnight is when i start the programs. I checked it at 12:06AM after the programs had started and it was back to 200% and the programs were set to run for excessively long times. I rebooted the OS and it the adjustment returned to 103%.
Something has drastically changed with the weather adjustment and it is consistently incorrectly popping it up to 200%.
I think i may have found the 200% culprit maybe. When wundergound returns “Precip Today -999.00″ it appears that may be forcing the calculation to go to 200%. Obviously we did not have -999.00” of rain today. Can erroneous negative valued data like that be treated like a zero in the calculation?
For a long time i had “west palm beach, fl” as my location with wunderground, but recently it had been displaying “westgate,fl” instead of “west palm beach, fl” on the OS home screen. So about a month ago i changed the location to my zip code “33417”. This put “west palm beach, fl” back as the location on the the OS home screen. “33417” is returning the erroneous data (“Precip Today -999.00”), i just changed it back to “west palm beach, fl” and i’m getting “Precip Today 0.00” and the adjustment is a reasonable 103%.
I see you are working on a solution to allow the use of weather.com’s data instead of wunderground. Maybe that will be a fix to.
Still if today’s precip comes in as an erroneous negative value, it seems the app could just treat it as a zero value.
This morning, I checked OS – the watering percentage was 3%. It hasn’t rained in a while, so that seemed low. The diagnostics showed a current successful weather update. So, I rebooted OS. When it came back up, the watering percentage was 41%. What is going on?
I have the same issue with 2.1.5(1), although my unit is not getting responses back from the api call. The requests are being made, but nothing is registering. This broke after my update from 2.1.1, and I’ve tried a few different local stations as well as the zip and city. Rebooted a few times but afte a few days still no luck.
Don’t think it’s the network given it was working and I presume these are just calls on port 80?
Bk
@xeinth: you said ‘I have the same issue with 2.1.5(1)’ and it’s not clear to me which issue you are referring to. There are several potential issues: some earlier firmware versions have bugs that prevent the weather call from being received when the HTTP port is not 8080. But this has already been fixed in 2.1.5(1). Also, 2.1.5(1) has added a feature that automatically restarts the controller if the last successful weather call hasn’t updated in 24 hours (and if there is no program that’s going to run within the next minute).
Another possibility for watering level not updating is that the weather station is returning invalid data.
If you check the last successful weather call time stamp and if it’s not within a minute of the last weather call time, something (perhaps your router) is blocking the network packets to OpenSprinkler. For example, if you have set to use static IP (i.e. DHCP off) you must make sure to set the correct gateway (i.e. router) IP as well. Otherwise OpenSprinkler will not get any data returned to it.
I’m having a similar problem with 2.1.5(1). My IP address is static, and I’ve set my gateway to 192.168.0.1 The last successful weather call is always blank.
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If last successful weather call is blank, it means the firmware never received the result of the weather call. Just as a quick test, can you switch to use DHCP, restart OpenSprinkler, and check again to see if the last successful weather call is still blank?
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