[Ray]

Is there some way to simulate SD card response? I would imagine that in general there must be a way to simulate input signals to the simulator — otherwise if the firmware is expecting a button click to continue, how would it do so in the simulator?

[Ray]

I think it may be useful to set up a subforum that connects users who have customization need with developers / programmers who have the skills to modify the firmware. Will anyone be interested?

[Ray]

Regarding ‘why the granularity wasn’t linear’, I think you probably have got the answer from my brief reply. Just in case it’s still not clear: the reason is that typically as the water time increases, the demand for accuracy also decreases. For example, if the water time is only 1 minute, then a few seconds of difference would matter a lot. However, if you are watering for an hour, a few seconds of difference typically wouldn’t matter as much. Hope this makes sense.

[Ray]

In both case A and case B, you said ‘I set the program “Start Time”=”Sunset” and the “Station”=”Sunset to Sunrise”’. So how are these two cases different?

[Ray]

The first thing you should check is whether the station is set to activate the master station. So click on the ‘Settings’ icon next to the station to bring up the station properties dialog, and see if the ‘Activate Master’ checkbox is on or not.

Also, please note that ‘Use Weather Adjustment’ is different from ‘rain sensor’. ‘Use Weather Adjustment’ means the watering time of the program will be multiplied by the watering percentage. You said ‘when rain is detected’ — I assume you have a rain sensor connected to OpenSprinkler. That’s independent of ‘Use Weather Adjustment’ — a station can be set to ‘Ignore Rain’ even if the program where it’s in doesn’t use weather adjustment.

Other than these, I can’t think of any reason why the master is not activated. The way master station is handled is different from other stations — it’s not affected by the rain sensor directly, instead, the algorithm turns on the master station if any station that associates master station is on. Rain sensor only affects non-master stations directly.

[Ray]

Those valves are likely latching solenoid valves, and if so they would requires an H-bridge to control. The easiest way to tell is to measure the resistance between the two wires of the valve. Generally if the resistance is above 20 to 30 ohm, they are standard DC valves, and can be operated using a relay board connected to free GPIOs. However, if the resistance is very low, below 10 ohm, it’s a latching solenoid valve and you will need H-bridge to control it.

[Ray]

Well, because you are running the firmware on a different hardware platform, I am not sure how to help you diagnose. I don’t have an Arduino Mega 2560 so I won’t be able to test. To start, maybe you should check the RAM usage of the compiled firmware and make sure it’s not exceeding the capability of Mega 2560.

[Ray]

I have never tried and simulator. I assume your report was referring to the message displayed in the simulator? That’s the step where the firmware is poking the microSD card. I think the simulator may be expecting signals that simulate the responses from the SD card. You can comment out that section of the code to see if the simulator can get you further.

[Ray]

If what matters is to shut down the system, would it be sufficient to just unplug the COM terminal block, or even unplug the power?

[Ray]

California watering restriction has been added to firmware 2.1.4. So after upgrading to firmware 2.1.4 you should see this option under Edit Options -> Weather Control -> Weather-based Restrictions.

Getting WaterSense certification is definitely on our todo list, however, we need to first roll out the ET based weather algorithm as it’s required by EPA. I am not sure how much rebate your city gives you. At the moment OpenSprinkler is still priced at almost $100 less than Rachio. So if the rebate is no more than $100, OpenSprinkler is still a good choice without the rebate.

[Ray]

For those who need a station to be associated with different masters in different programs — I thought about a work-around. The solution is to connect one solenoid wire to two station ports (i.e. dedicating two ports for one zone). For example, assume on the OpenSprinkler device, station port 1 is master 1, port 2 is master 2, port 3 is ‘Zone1_primary’, and port 4 is ‘Zone1_secondary’. The solenoid wire of zone 1 is connected simultaneously to port 3 and 4. Next, ‘Zone1_primary’ is set to activate master 1, and ‘Zone1_secondary’ is set to activate master 2. Now, when you need to run zone 1 with water from master 1, you simply use Zone1_primary; similarly, to run zone 1 with water from master 2, use Zone1_secondary. In essence, the way this works is that both Zone1_primary and secondary are connected to the same physical solenoid, so either will turn on that solenoid. However, they are associated with different masters, allowing you to switch between different masters.

[Ray]

My suggestion is to first check if the microcontroller is alive. For example, try to upload a firmware, or even simply run the following command (with USB cable plugged in):
avrdude -c usbtiny -p m328p
and see if there is any response. If the controller doesn’t respond to firmware update, or to the above command, it’s likely that the microcontorller is damaged. If you can’t figure out, send an email to [email protected] and we can follow up from there.

[Ray]

OK, thanks for the update. Useful tip in case others encounter the same issue.

[Ray]

Hi,

I believe what you described are all possible with OpenSprinkler. However, they will require changing the firmware code, as these features are not supported by default. For example, triggering watering from a float sensor is similar to how the rain sensor is implemented (which is supported by the firmware). Keeping track of total irrigation time, and logging are also fairly easy to implement.

We’ve received requests from time to time to customize the firmware. We don’t have the resources to customize the firmware on a user by user basis. When there is a common request, we will try to implement it and add it to the official firmware. One of the motivations to make the product open-source is to give users the freedom to change the firmware in any way they want. If you are not familiar with programming, hopefully this will be a good motivation to start learning to program 🙂

[Ray]

1) We are considering adding support for remote stations (defined by an ‘ip:port/station_index’) in the next firmware 2.1.5.
2) The current firmware 2.1.4 already supports running a program manually on the controller, using the third pushbutton (B3). Specifically, long press B3 for 3 seconds and follow the instructions on the LCD to start a program.

[Ray]

Well I think this request is too specific and I don’t think we will plan to add it unless if this is a common request. The work-around is to disable the controller operation during the time period, and enable it again after August 31st.

[Ray]

This is certainly possible. The only reason we haven’t changed the firmware to do so is for backward compatibility — we only started including microSD card from OS 2.3. For previous versions, one would need to install a microSD card to use the firmware. We don’t want to make this a required step.

We’ve done a survey earlier on the forum about compressing the water times, and I think the decision was unanimous that granularity of minutes is sufficient. Intuitively, the longer the water time, the less accuracy it needs.

You can feel free to modify the firmware to support higher precision. The compression is transparent to the UI — the firmware always decompresses the value when sending the data to UI, so the compression remains local to the firmware and the UI is not aware of it.

[Ray]

The latest version is 1.42, which is pretty much the same with 1.4, except the relay has been replaced by a pin header to plug in an RF transmitter (to support RF stations). The used/unused GPIO pins are exactly the same as 1.4.

[Ray]

The pre-release 2.0 uses a clear cover enclosure, and the official 2.0 uses the injection molded enclosure (white color).

[Ray]

A quick update of on-going development: I have been working on an experimental version of DC-powered OpenSprinkler. It’s powered by 9V DC power supply which is easier to source world-wide. Although this is 9VDC powered, it’s still meant for 24 VAC sprinkler valves. Technically this is based on my research of 24 VAC sprinkler valves in this blog post (http://rayshobby.net/understanding-24vac-sprinkler-valves/). Long story short, the controller uses a boost converter to bump 9VDC up to 24VAC in order to energize the valves initially, then drops the voltage down to 9VDC to supply the required current by the sprinkler valves. We’ve done some initial tests and it seems to work well. Some advantages of DC powered OpenSprinkler include: 1) power supply is lighter and easier to source; 2) the same controller can work with both 24VAC valves and DC valves (like 12VDC or 24VDC valves); 3) a DC circuit also makes it easy to do current sensing and detect shorted solenoids.

We will be releasing an experimental batch of the DC controller soon, hopefully within a week or two.

[Ray]

Could you not import old configuration, and just use a fresh installation to test? This way we can isolate problems of the firmware itself with problems that potentially occurred during import.

[Ray]

I honestly have not seen anything like this before. Can you try the following experiment: unplug the COM terminal block, restart the controller and wait for it to finish booting, then plug in the COM terminal block. Does it still pulse? If so, this is either an issue with the shift register or triac; if not, this is an issue with sprinkler solenoid. Let me know what you find out.

[Ray]

I think avrdude uses -b 115200 by default.

Currently there is a signed driver for Yosemite on this website:
https://www.mac-usb-serial.com/
which costs several dollars. However, CodeBender.cc and I have collaborated to develop a signed driver for all versions of Mac. I am not allowed to release it to the public yet, but if you email to [email protected] I can send you the driver directly.

[Ray]

@David: thanks for sharing your experience.

1) Regarding the label on the case: the missing ‘Power’ and ’24VAC’ labels are intentional. We are transitioning to use DC powered circuit, so in the future the power supply to OpenSprinkler will be 9VDC (instead of 24VAC). Although it’s powered by DC, it can still work with 24VAC sprinkler solenoids. The main reason to switch to DC powered circuit is that it makes the the controller compatible with both standard 24VAC solenoids as well as other types of DC solenoids. In addition, for international customers, DC power supplies are much easier to source than AC transformers. Due to this reason, the enclosures have removed the ’24VAC label’. But I admit that it should probably at least have a ‘Power In’ label or something that indicates the purpose of that port.

The ‘Power’ label used to be for the power switch. In the future we are planning to remove the power switch, and instead make that port a connector for flow meters/sensors. Due to this reason, the label ‘Power’ has been removed too.

2) Regarding the need to select the number of stations — this is just due to historic reason. Older versions of the controller were not able to automatically detect the number of stations on the expansion boards, so we left this as an option for users to select. Also, as Samer said, because OpenSprinkler supports RF (radio frequency) stations, users may want to set a larger number of stations than physically available. In the future we may consider splitting the virtual stations into its own group, so that they won’t be mixed with the physical stations.

[Ray]

Because the file is very large, you may consider using a download software like FlashGet or FileZilla as Pete suggested. The software can often resume download if it gets interrupted.

[Author]

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