[dkossman]

thanks – actually the RTC was set up. But it turns out the real cause of the problem was apparently just a poor or intermittent connection between the Pi and the Open Sprinkler board. One of the ribbon cable connectors apparently wasn’t seated correctly or there was some dirt on one of the contacts. I reseated it, and everything seems to be working fine now :-). I’m still seeing the “UU” entries in the output of i2cdetect, but I believe this is because these devices are in use by the program so show up as “Unavailable”.

BTW I also was having problems with the pi sometimes losing its wifi connection, and not re-connecting – found the “wicd-curses” package and would strongly recommend it to anyone having similar problems (or just to simplify setting up wifi on the pi):

http://windowslinuxcommands.blogspot.com/2013/06/raspberry-pis-new-wifi-manager-friend.html

my next project is to figure out the best way to connect my existing rain sensor (its just a NC switch that opens when it gets wet) to the pi/OSPI board, and integrate it with sprinklers_pi code.

regards
Don

[dkossman]

I’ve just received my OpenSprinkler 1.2 board and it’s hooked up to my new Rev B Pi and wired to my sprinklers. I installed sprinklers_pi and its dependencies, set up the schedules, zones and wunderground key, set the output to openSprinkler, etc. However, I’m seeing unreliable valve control – both when using the Manual option and when scheduling. the symptom is that sometimes a zone doesn’t turn on when it should, and sometimes it doesn’t turn off when it should. I’m checking the output voltage directly on the station pins. once it gets stuck, the only solution is to use the Advanced/reset function. the app continues to run and everything appears to be OK, but station control stops working.

I shut down the sprinklers_pi app and ran the ospi_selftest program, and this runs fine – all zones started and stopped as expected (i had disconnected everything, so this test was with no load, whereas when i was testing sprinklers_pi, the valves were connected).

I did notice that the output of i2cdetect has some UU entries – could this be the issue?

pi@raspberryospi ~ $ sudo i2cdetect -y 1
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f
00: — — — — — — — — — — — — —
10: — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
20: — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
30: — — — — — — — — — — — UU — — — —
40: — — — — — — — — 48 — — — — — — —
50: — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
60: — — — — — — — — UU — — — — — — —
70: — — — — — — — —

Has anyone else run into this? Thanks for any suggestions.

Don

[dkossman]

you’d need to connect the 1-wire temp probe to the appropriate Raspberry Pi GPIO pin, install the driver, and modify the sprinkler app to read and use this as current/local temperature, presumably combined with the wunderground data. not sure what you had in mind.

there are lots of how-to’s out there, see for example http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2013/03/raspberry-pi-1-wire-digital-thermometer-sensor/

Don

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