[PollieXmas]

Don’t do what I did and delete all your old programs to cater for this 😉

Simply create a new program and call it “CoCT Stage 2”. Then set it to start at sunrise or even at 7am (Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday). Then divide the allotted hour between all your stations and disable any old programs you had setup. This way switching back around April will be a breeze. (I altered my existing programs, realising too late that it was not required and I had quite a number of programs running independently to give me the flexibility I needed.)

The only thing that I have not enabled is to automatically disable the program when it rained (adequately) the day before. (I think we’re fairly safe until middle March though.) If we do happen to get adequate rain it is easy enough to manually disable the program or OpenSprinkler itself the first thing in the morning or the night before and enable it again when you get back from work.

I know there is a way to use weather predictions, but I have not had the energy to look into how to incorporate predictions. I use YR.no and find them the most accurate of all, but even they make adjustments a few hours before the current time. I’m lucky enough that they have a prediction for my neighbourhood but it still does not mean that if they predict 3mm that I will get all of it at my property. So to get this to work accurately, we’ll probably have to amend the code to use predictions in conjunction to a rain sensor and/or on-site rain meter for the lucky ones.

[PollieXmas]

Just to report back, that this seemed to have done the trick for me as it’s been more than a month since I’ve had issues with connecting to it.

[PollieXmas]

My setup has been working without a wi-fi drop for more than a month now.

I don’t think the config setting to prevent power-save mode is what did the trick but rather a post I found here in the forum about forcing the dongle/wi-fi to reconnect when it drops.

If you try and search for that or alternatively for posts I had commented on, you should find it.

I did not post back about my success as I wanted to give it ample time te see if it might drop the connection again.

[PollieXmas]

Hi All,

I also like Comatose’s pressure monitoring. The pressure fluctuation can probably countered by only looking at pressure differences between starting pressure, operating pressure and final ending pressure (per station). That means you’ll have to add a delay between activating stations to get a proper reading which might have another knock-on effect when using a master zone to activate a pump as then you’ll have to use a different pressure algorithm altogether as the pump should compensate for pressure fluctuations during an irrigation cycle and you would not want all closed valves while the pump is running.

It’s a slippery slope, but I can sense a solution at the bottom 😉

This of course creates even more headaches for Ray who yet to provide separate rain and flow sensors and I of course would want two flow sensors so I can also monitor any high usage or slow leaks on my main line to the house and not just on the irrigation line 🙂

The problem with leaks is that your probably only know for sure after month three when the second high water bill arrives. This can be a hefty bill which is even worse when it co-incides with water restrictions, so well worth installing some sort of warning system.

Either way I would be keen on either solution.

Regards
Paul

[PollieXmas]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for this. I also had an issue with my wi-fi dropping.

I’ve made the change you recommended and will see if the Pi stays up.

Regards

Paul

Ps. Have you made any progress on making your sd card read only? I’m also keen on this as it’s a real pain rebuilding the SD Card.

[PollieXmas]

Hi Ron,

I would suggest you open it up so you can access it from your house in case he requires troubleshooting. There nothing as frustrating having to talk someone through troubleshooting over the telephone…

I know this is a bit of a risk, but I’ve seen a few threads here that talks about allowing access from the internet while staying relatively save.

It is something I still want to do as well, but first want to get the Pi stable. I’ve also been having issues with the irrigation at midnight + my gmt setting and where my irrigation was out by 12 hours for a short while. The time was not stable but it seemed to always fix itself, I presume after an NPT check.

Regards

Paul

[PollieXmas]

Hi Guys,

I noticed my issue for the first time after I wanted to enable it after the winter. We had a “good” winter with enough regular rainfall that allowed me to disable irrigation.

Initially I had thought that each time it needs to check the weather that it will get the wi-fi dongle out of sleep mode and that it should be sufficient.

The same would go for NTP. I’m fairly confident that I have enabled NTP as far as I understand the Pi does not have it’s own clock and I’m running on GMT+2.

What might have thrown it off is that I set my location by clicking on the weather area on the top to the left. This took me to a map where I could pick my location. So I was not using Weather Underground. I have since changed to Weather Underground as I discovered that I actually had a WU API Key.

I’m not sure how often it does these checks and whether it is frequent enough. It usually also only happened when there was a day where no irrigation happened. So maybe it only checks weather and time when there is irrigation scheduled for the day.

Anyway, I now had to change my stations due to water restrictions. (Thus the quoted “good” above.) So I now run a station every day in order to stay within the allowable hours as I don’t like irrigating at night as it apparently causes issues for roses and sometimes grass as well.

Troubleshooting this is going to be an issue as you’ll have to write a little utility that sends emails at regular interval and then keeps a log. It should then increment the interval between emails after each day it was successfully at sending emails and doing an on-line check of some sorts. Then when it eventually breaks after a few months you should have the optimal interval to poll in order to keep the wi-fi alive.

The one thing I will have to check first is to see whether I did set the dongle to prevent it from sleeping after I rebuilt my SD card to the unified firmware. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=61665

Have any of you tried the steps above already?

Regards
Paul

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