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OK, now I am able to see the valve’s datasheet, it DOES look like your valve has a lower holding current than typical ones we’ve seen. Yours has a holding current of 91mA (vs. 250mA typical), and inrush current of 290mA (vs. 600mA typical). So it’s about a third of traditional valves. I guess that explains putting all 7 wires into one port works for you. Well I still think it’s a bit risky to put all 7 in one port, but if you can do with 4 zones in one port, that should be relatively safe.
Yes, using a higher current rating transformer means you can run multiple zones at the same time, but not all inserted into one single port. It’s similar to say your house may have a electric panel of 200A, but each individual power socket usually only drives up to 15A. You don’t insert all appliances into one single socket.
I did think about the possible new feature of ‘virtual zones’ where a virtual zone means it maps to several physical zones simultaneously. This is relatively easy to do in firmware, but it will involve some amount of UI work. I will have some free time in the summer and will consider implementing this as a new feature.
Did you mean to insert all 7 wires into one single port? Or did you mean insert 1 wire to each port and run them in parallel? I can’t imagine how the former could work, or if it does for a short period of time, how it can work more than a few minutes. If you look at the datasheet of the triac:
https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/848/Z0103MN-1846818.pdf
the maximum amount of current it can drive is 1A. If you evenly divide that by 7 valves, each only gets 140mA, which is way below the holding current of a sprinkler valve. This is waiting for trouble to happen, either the triac will burn out, or the solenoids will not reliably open because of the low holding current. Maybe your valve draws less current? Is it a special type of valve that draws less current than other valves? The link you provided cannot be opened so I can’t check its spec sheet.I am still puzzled by why can’t you use 7 ports and have the zones run in parallel. Is it because you don’t have enough zone ports? You can always get a zone expander to add more zone ports. In the firmware you can set these zones all to parallel, and that way you create a program, run each zone 1 hour, they will all turn on at the same time, so they all finish together. I just don’t understand why this is not a feasible option?
Well you can always write a script yourself and send command to OpenSprinkler to open zones in any pattern you’d like. A single firmware is not going to fit everyone’s need. The reason we make the whole product open-source is to give users the freedom of modify the software in any way they want.
Also, the firmware supports up to 40 programs, so technically you can create many programs to define when does each group of zones start. So in theory you can use multiple programs to do anything you want. It is certainly tedious and difficult to update this group of programs, but it should be able to achieve what you need.
If you want to hardwire multiple zones to the same port, please note that a single port can support no more than 2 parallel solenoids. Each solenoid draws 250 to 300mA holding current, and 500 to 700mA impulse current. The triac on each zone cannot drive more than 800mA to 1Amp max, so it can’t do more than 2 zones. You can always use an external relay, which can drive amps or even tens of amps. That way one single zone switches the relay, and the relay in turn switches high current load.
The firmware actually already rejects water time that’s too short:
https://github.com/OpenSprinkler/OpenSprinkler-Firmware/blob/master/main.cpp#L734
specifically it won’t water if the watering percentage is less than 20% AND the water time ends up being less than 10 seconds. The logic of the first condition is that if the watering percentage is high, that indicates the user intentionally wants to water a short duration.Of course this can be easily made into editable options: like if you want the threshold to be 20 seconds instead of 10 that can be easily changed. We can add this as an option. In the mean time, if you are interested in giving it a try, you can modify that line of code and recompile the firmware yourself.
I am not sure what you mean by “Due to the lack of being able to to this in the OSPI firmware,” — if you assign a zone to the parallel group, it can run at the same time with any other zone. So if you assign all 7 zones to the Parallel group, they can all run at the same time. Again, I would not recommend running this many zones together, so you will have to do it at your own risk (we’ve never tested running this many zones at the same time over long period of time). If your power adapter can supply this much current, it should be ok.
That’s an accessory that’s developed for our German distributor only so far. We will probably start carrying it ourselves once the firmware portion of it and UI have been fully tested. The circuit is made of two ADS1115 analog to I2C chips, adding a total of 8 ADC channels.
Click the gears icon next to each zone, it will bring up the zone attribute dialog. There you can choose whether you want to ignore sensor or not. All firmware features are explained in the OpenSprinkler firmware introduction video as well as the full user manual:
https://openthings.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000860920-videos-introduction-to-opensprinkler-v3
https://openthings.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000716364-opensprinkler-user-manualsHTTPs as server or client? OpenSprinkler can connect to HTTPs sites as a client. To make it a HTTPs server is very difficult.
We always recommend you to submit a support ticket. Usually when people post such questions on the forum, they don’t include information such as the hardware version, firmware version, whether using WiFi or wired Ethernet. It’s difficult to diagnose the problem without these basic information.
The misaligned pins are intentional — they are called ‘locked’ pins. Their purpose is to create slight mechanical tension so that the through-hole parts will stay in place even without soldering. The LCD in particular is not soldered, so this locked pins are important to make sure the pins and pads have good physical contact.
The GND and DGND was a mistake in an early version of the AC driver design. It has since then been fixed and I may have forgotten to update the files on Github. The mistake made one leg of C2 (decoupling capacitor) hanging and not connected, but it doesn’t affect the functionality of the board.
I’ve personally verified the flow sensing many times before on RPi and as far as my experiments went, it was quite accurate. I don’t have an RPi zero 2w so I cannot verify it for this particular version of RPi, but I’ve verified it on RPi 0 w, Rpi 2, Rpi 3 etc. What type of pulse generator are you using? Do you have a link? Also, what’s your version of raspbian?
The GPIO pin always refer to GPIO pin, it does NOT refer to positional pin. Generally we don’t use positional pin because that’s not how pins are referred to in a program. Please check the OpenSprinkler Pi user manual for details.
What firmware is running on your controller? And actually which controller do you have? If you are not already on the latest firmware (2.2.0) you should update your firmware first.
I believe this has been implemented by @rmloeb. You can check it on the openSprinkler-weather main github page:
https://github.com/OpenSprinkler/OpenSprinkler-Weather
search ‘Davis’ you will find the link.Well in that case, you can get a traditional sprinkler controller, and you can run OpenSprinkler with another controller in parallel. So if either controller turns a zone on, it can run that zone.
There are some subtle issues regarding the electrical part of running two controllers in parallel, but in general, as long as each of them uses their own power adapter (i.e. don’t share the same adapter), it should be fine.
If you look around for web-based sprinkler controllers, a lot of them don’t even have a screen nor any buttons. So it’s not like OpenSprinkler is any worse than them. If anything, it at least has a LCD screen and three buttons, and you can do some basic control using the buttons.
I don’t understand: you just need to use the app or web interface to create a program once, and then you can run it using the buttons. You can also stop all zones using a button.
If you want to do everything using buttons, why not just get a traditional sprinkler controller? The point of a web-based controller is to interact with the controller using an app or via web.
You can use the buttons on the controller to start a test program (runs every zone 1 minute), or start any existing program that’s already programmed on the controller. You can NOT create a program using buttons, but you can run an already created program using buttons. Long press button B3 will allow you to enter this mode.
If you just need a custom program that you don’t want to run regularly, a common practice is to create this program and set it to Disabled. That way it won’t run automatically, but using B3 you can start it.
Note that both sensor 1 and sensor 2 support ‘program switch’ feature. Which means you can connect a physical button to SN1-GND, or SN2-GND, and configure it as a program switch. When the switch is pressed it will start a program (for SN1 it starts program 1, for SN2 it starts program 2).
I recommend you to take a look at the OpenSprinkler User Manual:
https://openthings.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000716364-opensprinkler-user-manuals
and/or firmware 2.2.0 intro video to see all supported features:
https://openthings.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000860920-videos-introduction-to-opensprinkler-v3Update your repository and build again. The fix is to add a -std flag in the build script. The fix has been in the os33 branch for a while and I just got it merged to the master branch today.
OpenSprinkler firmware runs as a HTTP server. Once you get it running, you can run HTTP command locally on the RPi. You can use for example curl command.
I don’t think any software based protection will be able to shut off the triac in time. The short will happen instantly and there won’t be time for the microcontoller to respond. I’ve seen some commercial sprinkler controllers using a huge 10 ohm resistor for short protection. It works, but it’s not going to allow users to open multiple valves at the same time. So in case you don’t open more than 2 valves at a time, you can put a 10 ohm, 25 watt resistor in line with the common wire to server as short protection.
One possibility is to write a script (probably in Home Assistant?) that can send a command to OpenSprinkler via its HTTP API to trigger actions when the tank level sensor triggers.
Another possibility is to use some sort of remote switch, such that when the tank level sensor triggers, it sends a signal to trigger a relay via RF or any type of wireless signal. There are off-the-shelf wireless rain sensors that work this way. I would think probably some sort of wireless tank level sensor also exists.
How is your tank level sensor integrated with HA?
