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Hi Ray,
good to know you’re ok, even if we’ve never met 🙂At last I just swapped the two wires at the valves and carried on with life as usual 🙂
I wasn’t even aware of the “set” concept. I’m using OS to water my small 100 sw meters garden with 7 different sectors/valves.
Take care
RobertPS This cabling thing was a major upgrade for me. 7-8 years ago when I built my system I thought it was smart to use an Ethernet cable from OS to the valves (25 meters approx). BAD CHOICE. The single ethernet conductors are very thin and brittle and in the years failed a few times. I now upgraded to an 8 0,5 sq.mm conductor cable which is a lot easier to peel/join and has much less of a voltage drop.
Would the sensor status be shown in the web or phone apps?
Would it be logged as the watering events are?
Thank you very much Ray.
Cheers from Rome.
Aw so you mean something like this:
Internet->ADSL line->home router->Ethernet cable->Ethernet on power contraption->electric lines->Ethernet on power contraption->Ethernet cable
the above is what is already there to reach my current OS
new stuff: pocket wifi router->wifi->new wifi only OS
Of course the new pocket wifi would be connected to the last ethernet cable in the previous line 🙂
Would this be any batter than just buying a new OS with the Ethernet connector?
Thanks a lot
Thank you Ray.
I am not sure I understand your last suggestion.
OpenSprinkler is NOT reached by my WiFi signal at all, so do not understand the role of the pocket wifi router.
Ciao
Well I still love my old 2.1 HW with 2.1.5 FW OpenSprinkler but yes I noticed a good while ago that the Zimmerman correction stuck at 10% without any variation due to changing weather station.
I noticed that in the “System -> Location” there was my old “pws:ILAZIORO38” wunderground meteo station (which sits on the building in front of mine be they always blessed 🙂 and I have used for years.)
I click on it and via the map chose my home address which has now changed to another known location. Submit.
Now the homepage shows the right meteo conditions and the watering percentage is back to something sensible.
Could you maybe have the same problem?
PS Why is it not possible to use the old Wunderground PWS meteo station names? The one I used is https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/ILAZIORO38 and still exists and works flawlessly but I cannot find a way to input its name anymore.
Hi there Ray,
hope you’re doing well!Actually the problem was simpler 🙂
In my setup between the OS unit and the valves there’s a 25 meter run of an Ethernet Cat6 cable.
I used one of the wires as the common and the other 7 for the 7 sectors I need.
It turns out that after the 3-4 years some oxidation of the exposed end of the wire near the valve had caused a further drop in voltage.
Cleaned the wire and soldered it to the valve et voilà all is good.
Waiting for the same thing to happen to any of the other 6 sectors as I’m lazy (and really busy) 🙂
Take care
That is correct Ray. I have some programs set as “Water every 4 days” and when that falls on Sat and Sun it acts as an alarm waking up family.
Is there any way of subscribing via email, RSS feed or whatever other mechanism to firmware updates announcements only ?
2.1.5 has the very important modifiers for the zimmerman algo but I stumbled on it’s announcement just by chance visiting the forum (and missed 2.1.4 entirely).
Thank you very much.
Hello Samer,
yes Roma, Lazio is acceptable even though not ideal.If perfecting this further gives you an headache please disregard and focus on other things more important to you and to us ! 🙂
Just in case you’re interested I’ll try explaining a bit more.
As you can see in the attached WUnderground page (which points to the same station I have set in OS) up at the top left you see “Roma, Italy” which is the same string you just stated.
The problem with “Roma” is that’s the name of a large town, but also the name of a so called “Comune” which is an even larger area including some smaller boroughs, and also a “Provincia” which includes many smaller “Comuni” and is a very large area (5,352 km² 🙂 ).
So ideally the string that would be perfect is “Spinaceto” which is a small subsection of the city of Rome (you see it between Roma and Active advisory in the attached picture. Not quite sure as to where it comes from and wether it can be extracted though.
Please also not that for reasons I cannot understand the METAR station in the picture is Ciampino (LIRA) !!! I see no way to customize my wunderground profile and tell it to use LIRF instead (Rome, Fiumicino) which is much closer to my house.
Take care.
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Ray I like your idea but I think that in my case it wouldn’t work.
My OS (not OSPI) sits in my garden and is connected via WiFi but the wireless stage of my home router is turned off for most of the day (for health precautions reasons as I have little ones in the house) and is turned on only to check/modify the OS station.
So in my case I guess I’m back to square one and will not be able to use the weather modification unless the computing was done on the Arduino.
Thank you so much.
Aw great. Sorry I didn’t notice. I meant also logging the parameters which trigger the algorithm (avg. temo, avg, hum , rain amt) but it’s only a nice to have and so if complex I’d leave it alone.
ThanksWhat follows is only my personal opinion of course 🙂
Re the current Zimmerman algorithm I’d like to be able to change the % factors (4 per Farhe and 1 per deg mean hum) and also the thresholds (70F for temp and 30% for hum). I live in a coastal town and the current computed values are way too low since the average hum is always VERY high.
Also empirically I believe the average (?) wind speed could be usefully benefit in the simple algorithm since windy days tend to dry the plants.
ET would be far more sophisticated probably. But the simpler algo with modifiable parameters would be very good I think.
Are you looking at this ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penman–Monteith_equation
The only problem I see is the relative scarcity of meteostations which give radiation values (my neighbour’s station I use has it luckily) and the fact that for instance a lot of my little garden gets the shadow of buildings and one large tree and therefore the radiance factor in ET would be almost totally useless.
Thanks so much for making OS more and more of a GREAT BEAUTIFUL USEFUL tool !
Thank you so much Samer. I would PERSONALLY much prefer ILAZIOROM38 (less than one km away from my house) so I’d know where the values come from rather than the wildly inaccurate “Roma Ciampino” (more than 30 kms away) 🙂
If I go on this weather station wunderground page http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=ILAZIORO38 on top you see it says “Spinaceto” and that is the name of my part of Rome (Ciampino is technically not even Rome).
Take care
Bob
Did you check if despite the error message the FW was actually upgraded. I do this on Linux and there was a similar scary message but the FW got updated allright (but in my case the OS was detected – did you check the USB cable connection or cable itself ?)
Second question is really about your router configuration. Maybe you could post in that router forum ?
HTH
Yay ! Rebooting solved the timezone problem and ALSO the Zimmerman algorithm problem (I had opened another thread on this and will close it) ! 🙂
I still don’t understand why does it say “Roma Ciampino” on the home page though. It should say ILAZIORO38 I think !
Thanks a lot.
Thank you Ray, so if I understand well as I don’t have repeat actuations I should not have any problems.
The location is currently set to pws:ILAZIORO38 and before that it was just Rome (Italy).
Happy Easter to you and your loved ones !
