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I worked with Ray a month or so on this, and the Wunderground setup is fine. The weather and dusk to dawn settings appear to be updating but the weather and water control is not. The testing of this fails as indicated. Ray said the problem was resolved in the 2.16 FW, but that does not appear to be so as indicated from one of my controllers.
Bill,
I have 3 open sprinklers in California and none of them seem to be working. 2 of them one on hW 2.1 the other 2 on 2.2. One 2.2 is on FW 2.16(1) and the 2.1 and other 2.2 are on FW 2.1.4. The one with 2.16(1) is showing 0% with a Rain Delay of Sar, 02 Jan 2016 23:34:33. All three if I run the weather diagnostics I get weather data cannot be found for your location. I brought this up to Ray when I noticed it on my 2 units in the fields. So I took my new one in the box and updated it to 2.16(1) and I get the same problem. However the 2 on the 2.1.4 FW they are showing 200% watering time.
Interesting enough, if I click on the weather, tmp and clock on the main page it has all the current forecasts and dusk to dawn. I am not sure what part of California you are in but I am in San Diego, so my water restrictions include no water for 48 hours after a very small amount of rain. I am also limited to 2 days a week, Monday and Friday. My regular shrub heads are limited to 5 minutes max and my rotary/rotor heads are not limited to minutes. So I can only currently use the California restrictions. Yet, I believe Ray said that you cannot select Manual and California restrictions which does not make any sense.
But all in all my units are just not reliable.
So hopefully we can get some help and insight. I certainly am not trying to be Debbie downer, Ray has answer most of my emails promptly, I just have not had the chance to stay on top of it so I have to take some blame. But you are not the only one seeing weird and unexpected results.
Ray,
Can you expand in detail on the California water restrictions? As the restrictions are still different through out the state.
Thanks,
Ed
You could use a direct burial cat cable. For our irrigation I usually use direct burial irrigation line 10 strang 18guage.
I have been diving in to POE for a few months now and I have learned quite a bit. You may want to visit http://find-a-poe.com/ , which is texas wifi company. Their website has some good info what you are trying to do. I am now using the information I have learned here to inject 12v, 24v and 48v over cat 5e. I am using using the Opensprinkler micro controllers along with ubbiquity radios and hikvision cameras, all being powered with poe. Anyhow good luck, and maybe this will help you out.
So proof of abilities. I figured it was time to post a picture of the opensprinkler controller in the real world being used in conjunction with Ubiquity radios and HIKVision night vision surveilance cameras. Hopefully sooner then later, the new firmware coming to control lights such as the one depcited here in this picture will be controlled with the opensprinkler microcontroller as well when the dusk to dawn feature is implemented in a more usefull way.
Anyhow, this is the second os controller I have installed, I have a 3rd ready to go and intend on installing many more along with more camera’s while building a wifi mesh for our monitors.
Anyhow, bring on the 2.1.4 FW, I am ready to test my relay.
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I appreciate that Ray, I manage a large (very large HOA) that has over 50 irrigation controllers with an avg of 18+ stations along with common area lights which currently run off analog timers which I have to have my crew manually adjust them every month to compensate for the dusk to dawn times, and so on. (These are spread out over 69 acres and each one are in a locked meter room which means a lot of labor time to accomplish an easy task.
When I originally came across your controller and realized its capabilities, I began writing a control center for windows to manage these controllers with the intent on controlling every aspect from irrigation and light controller. Along with this I have began installing a wireless mesh with ubiquity radios, and installing IP Cams as well. All is coming along including your controllers. However with the changes that you have made your great firmware upgrades, I stopped developing my windows control center for them for now, because you guys were going in the right direction for full automation. (And you still are)
I am not sure you need to adjust your programming much, I just need them to start at dusk which is now available, the program can dynamically change the run time for the light station automatically by calculate how many minutes it needs to stay on by comparing it to how many minutes there is from the current dusk to dawn times each time it runs. So a few lines of code will suffice. Keep in mind I am using the same controller for irrigation and lights and in the future maybe for more applications. This was made possible when the feature to run multiple programs and stations simultaneously by option was added a few months ago.
With the new firmware release you mention making some upgrades and changes with V 3.0 hardware, I think you are continuing to go in the right direction with some great features. My crew already uses an android app I wrote for them to assist with logging stations, sprinkler types, gps locations and other features for our controllers to make it easier to mange them. I hope maybe, just maybe in the future information like this can be stored on the controller which with the addition to memory I think it will be. One of the other big things would be being able to upgrade the firmware remotely and retain the settings. But all in good time I am sure.
You may in the future also want to consider renaming your product slightly. Opensprinkler to many of my colleagues and customers means nothing more than an irrigation controller. It is much more.
Lastly, I don’t know if you considered that someone would consider using your device in such a large scale (50 Devices or so), but you maybe surprised that I am sure there are some others. I do see a minor problem in the future for someone like me with using the weather reports. If I have 50 devices looking for weather reports I will exceed my max real quick without having to change my plan with weather bucket. I could understand this if I was pulling weather from different areas but i am not. Maybe one device or the controllers could be redirected to check my server and I could have my server check it for all. I have not looked in to this yet as it has not come to play yet, but it will. I am pretty sure it will effect others as well.
Thanks for your time,
Ed
Dusk to dawn, I want to create a program to turn my light relay on st dusk and then turn it off at dawn. Unless I missed something I cannot turn it off only on.
Alright, I was pretty excited at first about this release up until I installed it and went to configure the dusk to dawn feature for lighting. Maybe I missed a setting or something, but I see the option to start the program either at dusk or at dawn, but I must be missing the feature to the end program feature at dusk or dawn. For this to really be a practical feature for this device it really requires both start and end settings and not minutes for the station.
Maybe I missed this somewhere which is possible and I really hope so.
Anyhow, please let me know if I just missed this or if it is an upcoming firmware upgrade this week. Other wise I really do not see a purpose for half of a feature.
Sounds good, I certainly understand about life getting in the way of things. Looking forward to the update.
Rey,
Here is the info for the mechanical relay I purchased.
This is a single pull double through 24VAC coil open style mount relay. I have tested it with my os controller and it does open and close. One the FW has been updated to allow the dusk to dawn controlling, I will test it further.
The price of the relay is about $19. The solid state ones with the heatsink would be similiar in pricing but I opted the mechanical relay.
Rey,
I intended on doing so, I just got it last week and tested last week. Its been very busy, but I will post the details and part numbers. The major reason I opted not to go with the solid state relay is I didn’t want to mess with the heat sync. When I get to my office this week I will post the part number and info.
Ray thanks for the info. Researching the solid state relays, I think I found one that will do the job.
CWA2425E
I will let you know how it turns out. BTW, the RF option is interesting, but in the application I am looking to use it, I think the relay is the more reliable way to go.
Ray, thanks for the info. The RF solution looks interesting and simple to do however it is my understanding that it would void the warranty of the OS.
Also, I just placed an order for 3 OSP and 3 expansion boards however it said v. 2.1. Will I be getting the 2.2?
I am looking for an open face relay, do you think this one will work:
I believe this one is 24VAC..
Ray, thanks for the info. The RF solution looks interesting and simple to do however it is my understanding that it would void the warranty of the OS.
Also, I just placed an order for 3 OSP and 3 expansion boards however it said v. 2.1. Will I be getting the 2.2?
I found the problem:
While plugging in the USB cable and hold the b2 button, 1-2 seconds MEANS 1-2 seconds and then let go.
This solved the problem, other wise the device is detected but the ID is not detected.
Ray,
Dead-simple, well I have tried installing this on 3 different Window 7 machines. While it appears to be simple it simply is not working. First, I have plugged my opensprinkler hardware in to the USB cable while holding the b2 but as described. My device is detected as an unknown device. So I loaded up the Zigdig app as described and selected the libusb-win32 and pressed Install and it fails. By the way my drop down box list is empty. So I go to options and checked the box that say’s list all devices and the box populates. I select the unknown device however the usbid remain 0000 0000. I tried to install the driver and it still fails.
I tried to extract the drivers but it does not tell me where they were extracted. So I have not been successful with installing the driver so I have not been able to update my device.
Please advise….
Just out of curiosity, while it will probably take years for the sd card to fill up, is there a way to delete the logs without pulling the sd card and deleting it from another device?
