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Ray,
Thanks for the background, but here is my bottom line: I bought a NETWORKED irrigation controller. I put it on my network and found that communications to the device was intermittent. I did some of my own troubleshooting with no effect.
After posting my issue on the forum, I found a few other users were trying to be helpful, offering suggestions on how to debug and troubleshoot. The response I got from you, the developer of this product, was “well what did you expect, it’s basically a DIY toy with under-powered hardware”. For me this is a hard stop.
In terms of other units on the market, I did some more research and recently bought a RainMachine HD. It’s been on my network for the last 3 days and has been rock-solid, despite my hesitation with using wifi. It also has a fully documented API that I can use, and the best part is that it can still be programmed and operated locally without a network connection. Of course, it’s $140 more than the cost of an Opensprinkler, but it comes with a 24V adapter, has 12 zones and a very nice touchscreen interface.I actually noticed these outages first when I looked at my Homeseer logs (I had installed the Opensprinkler plugin, which polls the OS for status on a regular basis). While checking my Homeseer logs, I noticed a few “could not communicate with opensprinkler” errors. At this point, I actually disabled the Homeseer plugin, in case it was somehow overloading the OS. This is when I pointed PRTG at the opensprinkler, and started with the pings every 5 minutes. Per my original post, the outages occur about once per day from approx 5 to 30 minutes. I have observed this consistently at some point each day that I had it on my network (from mid March to last Friday). The timing of these events does not appear to have any regular periodicity.
I understand that the OS may respond differently to ping than other requests, and that not replying to a ping may not necessarily mean that the OS is “offline”. However, for me, the acid test is connectivity with my Homeseer installation. My intention was to integrate it into my HA system. For that, I need to be able to communicate with OS 100% of the time. I wish I had more time to play with this, but it’s the start of irrigation season here so I just want something that works.I have a very standard setup with a number of devices connected to a Cisco sg200 switch. I also have a POE switch with a few IP cameras. All on static IPs. I use prtg to monitor the devices, typically pinging each device every 5 min. Prtg can also send http requests but I did not enable that for my OS. I can honestly say that the open sprinkler is my only device that has ever gone offline during normal operation. This includes my cheapo USB/network “print server”. I’ve changed ports and the patch cable, just in case, with no effect.
My goal was to integrate the OS into my homeseer HA system (there is a free plugin available) but it won’t fly with these frequent outages.
Reading through other forum posts tells me this is not an uncommon issue. My guess is that most people don’t run network monitoring tools so they just don’t notice it.Based on Ray’s response it looks like a fundamental limitation in the hardware, so I don’t expect this to be resolved. The fact that it’s so under-powered that it can’t respond to a ping when it’s doing other tasks boggles my mind. I would expect this from a $25 device, but not a $160 one (+ shipping + USD/CAD exchange). Unfortunately, I will be returning mine for a refund.
I’m pinging every 5 minutes, which doesn’t seem excessive to me. To be frank, I’m surprised that the controller wouldn’t be able to keep up with these basic housekeeping tasks. It sounds vastly under-powered for the task. I mean, that’s the whole point of a network connected irrigation controller, no? I still consistently get an approx 10-20 minute “outage” on a daily basis, and that is with zero programs running. I don’t have it connected to my system yet, it’s just idle on the network. I’m concerned that once I put this into operation these outages will get longer and/or more frequent.
