Wireless Motion Sensor possible/available?

[poenn]

Hi everyone,

I have an OpenSprinkler setup with 7 zones and it works great. The problem is dogs are shitting in our front garden every few days. Seems to happen at night or very early in the morning. I would like to activate the zone there based on motion detection. Is there something I can buy or some easy way to build this?

Thanks!
poenn

[Mike]

What about something like the diagram attached? You could use a 24vac motion sensor like this one and also wire in a common household light switch. You’d have to turn the light switch off at night, and then have a program that activated the station all night long. In the morning, turn the switch back on and resume your normal watering.

Attachments:

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   Dog-B-Gone.jpg
   

[poenn]

Thanks, I haven’t thought about it that way. Good idea. The problem is that my OS and the outdoor valves are very far away from the “dog shit area”, they are exactly on the opposite side of our house so I would have to run wires for the sensor all around it. This would be really messy. That’s why I would prefer something like a WLAN motion sensor which would trigger an URL or similar so that the OS runs a dedicated program.

[Mike]

You could also use a wireless motion detector with a relay in the receiver. Maybe not exactly this unit, but something similar.

[poenn]

Thanks, but I was hoping that there is something easy to integrate without interfering too much with my current setup. Right now I have ordered another IP cam to see which dog(s) is/are visiting our lawn. Maybe I can contact the owner then and do it low tech. 😉

[Ray]

It’s interesting you mentioned this — I am working with a friend on a ESP8266-based motion sensor (it uses a PIR motion sensor, which is very common), for a different application, but it can probably be used together with OpenSprinkler using a simple API. The main technical issue we are trying to solve at the moment is that the motion sensor seems very sensitive to ESP8266’s transmission resulting in false triggers from time to time (though it can be easily solved by moving the motion sensor away from the ESP8266 chip).

[poenn]

Ray, this sounds like an interesting project. In the meantime I found out that it’s a cat, not a dog. Shit is still shit though. 😉 Funny thing is that since the camera is pointing at the defacation area the cat has yet to come back. It only visited once since I put the camrera there, and without leaving something behind. I will keep the camera for a while to see if this persists. Still I would be interested how your project comes along. It would be cool if you could keep me updated.

[ab]

Wow Poenn i am having the exact same issue as you! I wish there was a simple solution to this using the current setup with Opensprinkler

[Author]

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