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Ah, Ray’s post did make me remember something. When I originally loaded OSPI onto my Pi, I did not have an opensprinkler adapter board, I was trying to use the PI IO directly to control the relays on my separate relay board. At that time OSPI was not able to support this, it only worked with the opensprinkler board itself (as it’s logic was to use the IO pins on a sort of bitwise method that then controlled the opensprinkler board). As a result, I had to install SIP (developed by Dan-in-CA) from github. I stand open to correction but SIP was 1 of the front-end applications that ran on top of open sprinkler. That worked perfectly for me once I’d installed that along with the ‘relay board’ plugin.
If OSPI can now support GPIO control on the PI motherboard directly then that’s great !
There is a plugin called ‘relay board’. Enable that, and then open sprinkler simply turns the IO pins on and off. Each IO pin can be used with each relay on the board, so that’s your sprinkler control (I’m assuming you know how a relay works, and how a relay can be used to connect the 12v power supply that drives each valve).
Kris/Dan, you guys are legends. My LED is working like a dream using the plugin with direct GPIO control happening for each sprinkler station. Thanks to you I also had to work out how to update my version of OSPi, which was seamless as well. The plugin manager worked perfectly and I now have the exact system I was hoping for. Thanks guys (+ Ray from OpenSprinkler) and keep up the awesome work !
Kris (and Dan), I am clearly guilty of seeing Dan’s original post and not really absorbing what he was saying. I’ll have a look and definitely give it a go ASAP. Thanks !
Does anyone know if there is a way to get the interval application to use the GPIO directly rather than using a shift register ? Given that there isn’t any issue using 8 GPIO pins on the Pi (as there is no shortage of GPIO) I’d like to see if I can get that working rather than trying to integrate a shift register into the wiring of my relay board (which is an off-the-shelf 8 relay board off Amazon).
I’m losing a bit of faith in using a PI as a sprinkler controller. I tried the sprinklers_pi application that was pre-installed on the OSPi SD card, but no matter what I set the GPIO settings to (direct positive or negative) I couldn’t get ANY of the GPIO pins to react at all when I activated a sprinkler. In fact, I set the application to Direct Negative (meaning all the GPIO pins should have been ON when no zones were active), and not a single GPIO pin was active (I tested all with a LED). If anyone has got sprinklers_pi to work, please let me know how, as from what I see thus far, it does nothing.
OK, I was hoping to use a regular relay board instead of the OSPi add-on (as I can’t get the OSPi add-on in South Africa). If the app uses a shift register, then I’ll have to just control the GPIO directly via some scripts rather than using the OpenSprinkler software. Great job in designing such an awesome tool, but in my case I’ll have to find another way. Thanks for replying on this forum so rapidly !
