[William]

I found a fair amount of ‘buzz’ on various forums regarding corrupted EEPROM data on ATMega applications. It involved the execution of instructions when voltage was below spec. I suspect that rather than going on or off my line voltage may have been low for several seconds. The EEPROM data in my ONKYO receiver was also corrupted.

[William]

Regarding a daily preview in my Alexa skill, Got It! The links you sent me were a big help. I know a lot more about binary operators in python than I did 4 hours ago.

There are some limitations to my work. Alexa answers “The sprinklers will <not> run today.” If weather adjustment is TRUE, she adds “Weather adjustment may inhibit them, however.” If there is more than one program, all are tested, however, if there is more than one board the program will terminate cleanly with a status error.

Since I am not using odd/even, I will leave that code for another day. Once I am sure this much works right, I will add that test. Adding odd/even testing will be a bit involved since my code structure is not all it should be.

Thanks again. Now my wife can tell if it is safe to go out in the yard to feed the cat.

If any one needs this Python code, I can post it with my info redacted.

** Edit **

Should others follow in my footsteps, here is an odd problem. If you host your Skill on Amazon’s Lambda site you may run into a time zone problem. The Lamda site apparently runs on UTC, so the datetime.datime() python function will return times and days UTC, not local time. If you test your code on your desktop it may run fine, but the same code uploaded to Lamda gets the date or day of week wrong! Naturally, this could effect things other than Open Sprinkler. I have not noticed this peculiarity documented anywhere. The solution is to use the pytz library to make datetime.datetime() time zone aware. None of this is a problem if you live in Greenwich England!

One other thing. You can not name your skill OpenSprinkler, either with or without the space between open and sprinkler. Open is a ‘reserved’ word.

[William]

Thanks. I will work on the addition to the sprinkler skill.

Yes. Regarding OG, yes, I think that would do it. I was thinking about adding the sound module, but that is probably overkill. The detection of the ‘opening’ variable would result in ‘<2s pause> Good, the door is moving <2s pause>’. That reply would burn up enough time that a timeout inside of my ‘while’ loop would be avoided.

[William]

Yes! If you can point me to the relevant code, that would be a big help. I can translate the Javascript into Python and be on my way.

On another topic, I will likely post on the OpenGarage forum, I have been thinking about an Alexa skill for OpenGarage. I am pretty sure that your code and hardware would need modification to make it work. Alexa, depending on where it is in the code, times out in three seconds. This can not be changed. The delay() function, if used, is ignored. My garage door takes about 8 seconds to open. The OpenGarage skill would have timed out before it tripped the rangefinder for confirmation of success. I think, perhaps, the solution is to use an audio sensor (the simple ‘go/no go’ kind) to detect that door is in motion. Immediately after an open/close command is sent the skill could get back a JSON string with ‘sound’ ‘yes/no’ and say something like ‘<pause> good, I can hear it moving <pause>’. This would take up enough time for the door to finish moving before the timeout and confirmation of success could happen with the rangefinder as usual. I have been working with the EPS8266 variants lately and they are pretty nice.

I need to think about this a little more and then I will get something up on the other forum.

[William]

I would like to have my Alexa skill answer the question; “Alexa, are the sprinklers running today?” Looking over the API, I don’t see an easy way to compose a JSON string that will give the skill enough information to determine if before midnight of the current day, the sprinklers will run. Am I missing something? The phone app seems to do this.

Bill

[William]

Ray, I considered using /cr but decided against it. Alexa often gets things wrong. /cr would require a pretty long utterance (Amazon’s term of art for instructions to Alexa) to be heard 100% correctly. “Alexa, water zone six for 3 minutes, 30 seconds” is about the best I can hope for. Even with that fairly short utterance I have her reply. “Watering has started. Zone 6 will be watered for 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Open Sprinkler reported all is well”. The ‘all is well part’ is triggered by a <200> response code from the JSON call.

It would be really nice to make this available to others, but it would be difficult. First off, I doubt many would be interested. Worse yet, somewhere a reliable, secure server would have to ‘broker’ ( I am sure that’s not the right term) everyone’s usernames, passwords, port numbers and globally mapped I.P. addresses to the Amazon Echo skill. That appears to be what Nest is doing with the thermostat and smoke alarms.

[William]

Thanks Ray, if you ever want to continue the development of something in this direction, let me know. I have the python code that is at least a starting point.

My next project with it will be to add the ability to water zones and not just programs. Its not terribly tricky except you would now have three “slots”. “Alexa water {zone, program} for {1,2,3, etc. minutes}”

You

Bill

[William]

Ray, here’s a video of the skill in action.

https://1drv.ms/f/s!AmXKqAwyCrbxhq9Y6SGGk4MUOMVvxg

[William]

Sadly, yes. Each user would have to sign up as a Amazon Developer, sign up for the Lambda site (which requires credit card information) and follow a ridiculously long set of instructions to get the code running. OpenSprinkler would have to be mapped to an external IP with Duckdns or something similar. The external address and port would then be mapped to the skill along with the MD5 password. Because of the required mapping, this would never be a skill approvable by Amazon for publication.

Its a lot of work for most users to shut off or turn on the sprinklers orally! If OpenGaragedoor uses JSON strings, that might make more sense. You could open the garage door with your hands full.

Ray, here is a link for setting up a skill for a Kodi media player. I am including it because the instructions are great. Very detailed. The steps apply to any unpublished skill. https://www.howtogeek.com/249336/how-to-control-your-kodi-media-center-with-an-amazon-echo/

All that being said, It would be fairly complex for you guys to incorporate this. There would have to be some sort of phone based “handshake” like NEST uses to get the IP address and MD5 password into the Skill.

[William]

I agree with Ray. I was experiencing this problem, but I am no longer.

Bill

P.S. California has relaxed most of the rules. Many cities have relaxed their rules to match or in some cases left a few in place.

[William]

Does this tread help?

https://opensprinkler.com/forums/topic/ospi-version-2-1-3-using-wunderground-personal-weather-station-error/

[William]

Sure, on the ubee modem DHCP reservation is found as follows:

Login as admin:
Basic >> DHCP -> (bottom of the screen) DHCP Clients

The ubee modem has considerable trouble with the NEST thermostat. When the NEST is busy, it puts the network connection in standby. Apparently there an established protocol for this function. When the NEST sends the RESUME command the ubee modem ignores it and the connection is lost. I ended up plugging my power hungry LINKSYS router into the ubee modem to provide connectivity to the NEST. So far this problem had not affected the Arduino version of opensprinkler. I am mentioning it because it could conceivably affect the other hardware versions.

Bill

[William]

Ray,

Yes, that would work. My ubee modem did not call it DHCP reservation, the term I am familiar with. I missed it in my menu look-thru.

[William]

Ray,

I use duckdns to access opensprinkler remotely. If DHCP assigns a new address then I have to change my port forwarding to make it match. A static IP would be better. Also based on my experiences with LibreElec my Time Warner furnished modem does not provide DNS at the gateway address (at least not reliably). At a minimum, it would be helpful to see what address opensprinkler is attempting to use for DNS. The ability to set a static IP, Gateway and DNS would be really helpful. Remoting in with SSH to do it would be fine.

Bill

[William]

Is there a way to tell what IP address Open Sprinkler is using? After reading the post above I checked my last successful weather call and found it blank ‘–‘. I rebooted and got synched times and dates at the time of the reboot. I know from problems with LibreElec that my Time Warner modem does not supply DNS from the gateway address. Is there a way to give Open Sprinkler an external address such as google’s open DNS 8.8.8.8 if it is trying to use the gateway?

[William]

That makes good sense. Thank you. This IOT stuff it more complicated than I thought.
Bill

[William]

Interesting. So how does the script change flow down to the end user? Will the change be later implemented in the iPhone, android and web apps or does something else happen?

[William]

Will there be a version 2.17 with this change available shortly? Due to laziness, I would prefer to load it with the more or less automatic update program on my laptop.

[William]

Ray,

Any chance of working on this bug in the near future? It seems to be affecting a few people.

Here in SoCal it has rained so infrequently that manually readjusting 0% to 100% has not been needed very often. Hopefully that will change.

Bill

[William]

Ed,

Do your changes include the a fix for the “California Restrictions, watering stays at 0%” problem?

Bill

[William]

Ed may have tried Rain delay in auto. I have only tried it in manual. I can report that is stays on 0% on that setting. We have had so little rain, it is hard to test various conditions and settings.

Regarding enforcement, on peons like myself there is no enforcement except for random warnings. The value of the fine would to be worth the bother. In Ed’s case with 68 acres or so under management, he might be no be so lucky.

As far as how the cities might develop an enforceable reference point, I don’t know and I doubt they do either. It probably would turn into one of those guilty until proven innocent things. That’s one of the really cool things about opensprinkler: the log.

[William]

Yup, as we probably both expected I am stuck at 0%.

Here’s my log:

{“devt”:1450346658,”nbrd”:1,”en”:1,”rd”:0,”rs”:0,”rdst”:0,”loc”:”Orange, CA”,”wtkey”:”d6d1cbf265d1feb9″,”sunrise”:410,”sunset”:1004,”eip”:401731111,”lwc”:1450343377,”lswc”:1450343377,”lrun”:[4,1,462,1449560311],”sbits”:[0,0],”ps”:[[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]],”wto”:{“d”:48}}

Rain delay is off but watering % remains zero.

Bill

[William]

dun4cheap,

Yup, I am still sitting at 0%. The problem confirmed. Since you already have multiple tickets submitted, I will not pile on just yet. I assume ray reads these posts.

Bill

[William]

dun4cheap

I have more hours to wait before I see if the watering % moves up from zero. I can report day after tomorrow

This is the water station in the backyard.

http://orangecaweather.duckdns.org/weather

[William]

Good point dun4cheap. I assumed that watering % was used to implement an inhibition of watering. That may not be the case. There has been so little rain I can barely test.

[Author]

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