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Created a pull request with the station refresh fix as well as setting the correct duration on the remote stations both during the initial call and also with the refresh option (tracks the finish time so duration can be calculated from finish – current time).
What I did was to have two master valves. One for regular watering and another for fertigation. I use the OSPi. I have OpenSprinkler configured to use the regular valve and then when I want to fertigate, I use a cron job to call a Perl script (could have been a shell script) that shuts down OpenSprinkler and takes over to do the fertigation and then fires OpenSprinkler back up. Fairly easy. Don’t really like shutting off OpenSprinkler, but necessary to keep it from messing with the valves.
I should probably add that the API documentation for cm appears to need updating. It states “An error code will return if you try to open the master station (as the master cannot be operated independently), or open a station that’s either already running or in the queue waiting to run.” After watching this refresh using cm the way it does I tested it for myself. Attempting to open a station that is currently running on the remote simply resets the time – it doesn’t return an error. I’m guessing the functionality was changed some time back from what it originally was.
I’m not an expert either, but the pressure regulators I’ve seen are for making sure that the pressure doesn’t exceed X amount and reducing it if it does. If you want to increase pressure (my problem), you need a pump. Most people have a pressure regulator in their home (typically required by code) to make sure if you suddenly see a pressure surge from the water company it doesn’t blow up the plumbing and appliances in your house. Some of us (like myself) really wish it could increase water pressure so I wouldn’t have to whine to the city about my lackluster culinary water pressure (I have issues with both culinary and secondary(irrigation)).
Water pressure is essentially a form of potential energy given there are devices that can turn pressure into electrical energy – so it makes sense if you’re pressure is too low that you’ll need a device that turns electrical energy into mechanical energy (an electric pump) to get the pressure back up.
The only way I’m aware of to pull that off would be a pump – and a pump isn’t cheap, would require more than a trivial amount of electric in a spot I’d rather not run it to (short of some major plumbing to run it back to house from the street, then back to the street from the house), and probably require a decent amount of maintenance. I was hoping (probably falsely) for something fairly cheap here. I priced some flow sensors (another approach) though, and if they’re any gauge, there probably isn’t a cheap way to do this. Now if you’ve got some trick I’m not aware of, please enlighten me – I’d love to discover there really is a cheap/easy way to deal with this.
Strike that. It is a netstat and a OpenSprinkler glitch from what I can tell –
OpenSprinkler glitch because it requires IPv6 to work
netstat because it reports OpenSprinkler is only binding to IPv6 when it fact it is binding to IPv4 and IPv6 both.I’ve got this running on the old firmware now (didn’t feel like going to the barn to reflash it) – I just had to load the “ipv6” kernel module and I was good to go (other than netstat telling lies about what’s going on). I’ll probably get around to updating the image sometime…
I just ran into this when upgrading. Any suggestions on how to get OpenSprinkler binding to ipv4 instead of ipv6?
Yes, I realize the hash is static. The call in general was just more work that writing a few values out.
The problem with the master is that 95% of the time I want everything attached to a particular master – and I like being able to hit the main menu and manually launch one of them with no fuss. This means I leave them associated with that master. My problem is the 5% of the time when I need a different master. I don’t want to be constantly reconfiguring the master to make it work, or running without a master (running valves in parallel) to get around the master issue because while the parallel approach works well in a program, it doesn’t work well when I want to just manually fire one off. Through and API could reprogram the master just so I could turn around and call the valve and get it to work the way I want, and then reprogram the master when I’m done, but that’s a lot of hassle for something that should be fairly simple. For the moment, I’ve got a quick and dirty script that simply stops OpenSprinkler, does it’s deal (for the fertigation unit), and then fires OpenSprinkler back up when it’s done. I don’t like stopping OpenSprinkler, but it works. I may consider modifying OpenSprinkler to get something closer to what I want. It’s been about 20 years since I’ve done serious coding in C, but I think I can get back up to speed fairly quickly if I decide I want to do it.
I do very much appreciate your Open Source approach 🙂
That link provides removal instructions which seem a bit like a sledgehammer. Maybe I’ll hack on the code. Worst case, I can just stop it, run my program (cobbled together some perl (calls the bash script rather than doing it myself because I was lazy…) for what I wanted), and then start OpenSprinkler back up. I’d prefer to not stop it at all though as that provides some insurance that should something go wrong with my other program, it’s still running.
I had considered doing API calls to OpenSprinkler, but the combo of fooling with things like the password hash for a local program and dealing with the fact that I was uncertain whether the call would trigger only the valves I wanted or also trigger the master attached to them (not wanted), I decided I wanted a little more direct interface to the valves.
Thanks for the confirmation on the OpenSprinkler behavior though.
With Option #1, will weather adjustment or anything of that sort throw the timing of the master valve out of alignment with the rest of the program? I think the answer is “no”, but I’m not certain. I’ve toyed with the idea of using some of the manual “on/off” type tools and a script to deal with one of the masters (used infrequently) and then just use the other master for everything else.
Option #2 means I need to buy expansion boards. Might have to anyway. *shrug*
What I’m up to is the second master actually redirects things through a fertigation unit for when I want to fertilize.
