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The 5~24VDC operating range just means the controller can work with voltage within this range. For driving 24V AC solenoids, as I mentioned in the post, 9V DC is the optimal as it provides just the right amount of holding current (typical 24V AC solenoid resistance is about 35 to 45 ohms).
In case you want to run 12VDC solenoids, or 24VDC solenoids, you can do so with OpenSprinkler DC by changing to use a 12VDC (or 24VDC) power supply. So you are basically matching the power supply with your solenoid specification. Still, I suspect that even 12VDC or 24VDC solenoids would work just fine with a 9VDC power adapter, because usually once energized these solenoids can stay on at a much lower voltage, and the boost converter will help energize them initially.
You are right that 5V is below the starting voltage of 7805. However, you can actually plug in a USB cable (5V) to OpenSprinkler DC’s USB port to power it, and this bypasses 7805. The circuit design has a diode that back feed the 5V to the COM wire so you can power solenoids using a USB adapter. I’ve tested sprinkler solenoids and it works just fine. In short, you can power 24V AC solenoids with just a USB cable plugged into the USB port. This sounds a bit wild. I don’t want to advertise this because it’s not fully tested and I don’t know how reliably it is. At 5V the holding current is only about 150mA, which is technically below spec, but it seems to work ok.
Are you sure it was 2:49 hours? If it shows 2:49 that actually means 2 minutes and 49 seconds, because OpenSprinkler allows watering down to 1 second. If it’s 2 hours it would appear as 2:49:00.
I can reproduce the issue. However, if you use a nearby personal weather station as your location, it seems to work. For example, I used:
PWS:ITASMANI139
as the location and it works. This is one of your nearby weather stations.1) It’s already available:
http://rayshobby.net/cart/osdc
We will make it available on opensprinkler.com as well (still finishing up the product page, but should be done within a few days).2) The main benefit of the DC version is that the power adapter (9VDC) is easy to source and the same adapter works universally everywhere. If you’ve seen 24VAC transformers — they are heavy, bulky, expensive, and do not work universally (e.g. output voltage is proportional to the mains voltage). This is the main reason for the design of the DC version. For US customers, this is probably not a big deal, but if you ever need to replace the transformer, it might still be an advantage.
I consider 9VDC to be safer than 24VAC — the peak voltage of a typical 24VAC transformer can reach as high as 40V, which is somewhat dangerous. If you accidentally shorted the wire to something it can result in big damage. In contrast, 9V is a lot safer.
Also, in the past we’ve received several requests to make OpenSprinkler compatible with DC solenoids, and we ended up having to customize the controller for these customers by replacing triacs with MOSFETs. With the DC version the same controller can now work with both AC solenoids as well as DC solenoids. That’s a another advantage.
Going a little more technical: the MOSFETs used on the DC version can sink as much as 3 amp continuous and 30 amp impulse current. So it’s a lot more capable in terms of handling shorted solenoids and so on.
The Vera plug-in is not written by us and I think it only works for an earlier version of the firmware (2.0.9 or earlier).
You can use dynamic DNS service — many routers these days support dynamic DNS. The idea is that every time the IP address changes, it will report the change to the dynamic DNS website. And you can access your network using an easy to remember DNS name, instead of the numeric IP address.
The three numbers are used to adjust the relative weight of each factor: temperature, rain, humidity. In the past users have reported that the default weights used by the Zimmerman method is too aggressive (e.g. the watering level reduces too dramatically with respect to temperature change). Therefore we provided the ability to change the weights. You can leave them as is (100%), but if you feel any of the factors should have less influence on the watering level, you can suitably reduce the weight.
As the user manual describes: ‘additional start times that run over to the next day will be ignored’. What this means is that if you have a program that starts at 23:00pm, and repeat every 2 hours twice, then only the start time at 23:00pm will run. The additional two start times (which would have occurred at 1am the next day and 3am the next day) will both be ignored. The reason these are ignored has to do with how the scheduler works — it will only check programs whose first start time falls on today. Ideally it should also check programs whose first start time falls on yesterday, but this is more complex to check and hence it’s not implemented yet.
“Also two other channels were turned yellow and some strange figures appeared.” — can you be more specific? Do you have a screenshot?
Samer and I have had some thoughts about adding more station attributes, such as sprinkler type, flow rate. A note/comment can be an additional one. In the past this isn’t possible for the microcontroller-based OS. But now that OS is shipped with built-in microSD card, it should be possible to get this supported on all of OS, OSPi and OSBo. We will probably still have to limit the length of the note.
1) If you go to demo.opensprinkler.com, click the lower right icon (or press key ‘m’) to bring out the menu, and go to Edit Programs, you can see the first program has a station set to run for 45 seconds.
2) On the homepage, click on the ‘Settings’ icon next to each station name, that will bring up the station attributes dialog. Uncheck ‘sequential’, that will set the station in parallel (non-sequential) mode.
First, in case you haven’t seen this, the table here compares OS/OSPi/OSBo:
https://opensprinkler.com/faq/#technical– You are right that all of them run the same firmware, the OpenSprinkler Unified Firmware.
– To make them all compatible, if we release cloud support, it will also be available on all three products.
– The plugins are only available for OSPi/OSBo by running Dan’s Python-based Firmware. It is not part of the Unified Firmware.We only recommend OSPi for users who have experience with RPi and have knowledge about Linux. The reason is that unlike OS, OSPi is not a fully assembled product — you will need to provide RPi and burn SD card yourself. No matter how easy the set up process is, you will eventually encounter something that requires technical skills. So if you have no experience with RPi or Linux in general, we would recommend OS instead.
Regarding pins: please note that all RPi pins are mapped out to the pinout area close to the top of the circuit board. Whichever pin you need to use, you can find it available there.
With no network connection, you will lose features such as weather-based adjustment, remote access, and time sync as you remarked.
OK, so I just found that firmware 1.7 allows you to set time manually. To do so, first flash your controller with firmware 1.7. Then open a browser and type in the IP address (you can’t use app because the app doesn’t support firmware 1.7 which is a very old version). Go to Options, and check the ‘Change time?’ checkbox. Underneath that type in your current time, then password (opendoor), and click on Submit.
Once this is done, the RTC should remember the time, so when you upgrade to firmware 1.8.3 the time should be preserved.
If you can’t find the firmware 1.7, it’s in folder ‘osFirmwareUpdater/Firmware/OpenSprinkler_v1.4’.
Ideally you should have OpenSprinkler installed on a network with Internet access so it can perform NTP sync. Without NTP sync, the time will start to drift.
I would think 1.8.3 leaves an option for you to manually set time. I will check. Perhaps a work-around is to first flash the firmware to an earlier version (like 1.8.0 or something), which gives you the ability to manually change time. Once the time is set, it’s remembered in the RTC, and they you can flash to a more recent firmware.
The latest firmware has added support for I2C LCD for the microcontroller-based OpenSprinkler. We haven’t added the same support for OSPi yet. But on Github there is a pull request that has implemented I2C LCD for OSPi and OSBo:
https://github.com/OpenSprinkler/OpenSprinkler-Firmware/pull/8
I haven’t had time to carefully check the pull request, but you can feel free to experiment with denisfrench’s code provided there.You can host the web UI on RPi itself. We don’t include this in the preconfigured SD card because we make frequent changes to the UI and to get the latest changes you would have to update your local copy manually. So the default option is to use the UI assets hosted on opensprinkler server, this way updates are automatically accessible to everyone.
NTP sync is performed every time the controller reboots — unless if you had set NTP sync option to Off. Another reason it can’t perform NTP sync would be if your router cannot access Internet, or if you’d set static IP but didn’t set the correct gateway (i.e. router IP), such that the controller will send NTP request but cannot receive the response.
Firmware 1.8.2 is a while back, so I can’t quite remember how to set a date/time manually — I believe it allows you to do so through the web interface.
Another option is to make use of the ‘Master On Adj.’ and ‘Master Off Adj.’ parameters. These allow the master station to stay on later or earlier than the station’s stop time. However, the parameter only goes up to a few minutes, so if you need more than a few minutes of delay, the solution you described is a better solution.
Support for mini-relay has been discontinued (in both hardware and software) since earlier this year. If you want to use a relay with OpenSprinkler you can wire a 24VAC relay just like a standard sprinkler valve (see the blog post below about available 24VAC relay options)
https://opensprinkler.com/using-24v-ac-relays-with-opensprinkler/The unified firmware is written in C++ to maintain maximal compatibility with the microcontroller-based OpenSprinkler. If you are familiar with C/C++ I think it’s not too difficult to go through the code and find out where to add additional code. For example, if you want to add an additional sensor, you can follow how rain sensor is implemented as an example. We should probably document this somewhere, but the source code is basically partitioned as follows:
– defines.h: global macro defines, options, GPIO pin definitions
– OpenSprinkler.h/.cpp: functions / data structures that are relevant to the basic / low-level operations, such as loading/saving options, station attributes, controller status variables
– main.cpp: this is where the main loop is defined, which is in charge of scheduling of sprinkler stations, handling of log, time keeping and so on.
– weather.h/.cpp: initiate weather queries and handling query results
– program.h/.cpp: data structure for sprinkler programs.F0: we use 2A fuse, but anything above 1A should work fine, the exact value doesn’t matter
IC2: yes, LM1117-33 (3.3V LDO)
L2: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/EXC-ELSA35/P9820BK-ND/44717 (I think 2.2 uses SMD bead, and the link on the left is through-hole, but you can find equivalent SMD version, the size is 0805).
T1 to T8: MAC97 works fine (you are right that BT1308W only exists in SMD form)
V1-V8: we use 7D560K
@ottorino: according to the output of avrdude, you have successfully upgraded your firmware. The warning messages have to do with the behavior of the bootloader upon reset, and the warning about chip signature is normal (2.1 uses ATmega644 whereas the command you are running is for ATmega644p. The p version is the same as non-p except it’s pico-power, and has a different signature).
With WUnderground, you basically have to rely on the accuracy of the weather data reported by them, and it sometimes doesn’t completely match what you observe.
The user manual explains the difference between the rain sensor, rain delay, weather adjustment, and the interplay between them:
https://opensprinkler.freshdesk.com/solution/categories/5000022938/folders/5000147083/articles/5000632569-user-manual-firmware-2-1-5-current-
page 15.Sure, since this sensor outputs a digital signal, you can connect it to any GPIO pin and set that pin as input to receive the sensor output. You may need a 5V to 3.3V level converter (a 100ohm resistor followed by 3.3V zener diode is sufficient) if the output is 5V. Then you can modify the firmware to trigger any event when the soil moisture sensor status changes. For example, the simplest is to treat the soil sensor as rain sensor — if the output is high (i.e. moisture is sufficiently high), stop all zones from watering. In fact, I think you can even connect the output directly to the rain sensor port (one pin on the rain sensor port is connected to GND, so the GND wire from the moisture sensor should go to that pin, and the signal wire goes to the other pin).
Beyond this kind of simple sensor, there are also commercial soil sensors that are designed to work with basically any sprinkler controller. One example is Hunter’s Soil-Clik. Again, these work almost like rain sensors that will prevent the controller from watering when the soil moisture level reaches a certain threshold.
That’s a bit odd. All OSBo boards are fully tested including RTC test — we test 1) if RTC exists on the I2C bus, 2) a time can be set on the RTC, and 3) if the RTC remembers the time. Of course this is using a tester and not a BeagleBone board so the issue you are seeing might be software related (i.e. RTC software module or setup). I will try to follow your steps and see if I can reproduce the errors.
