Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Ray, what am I missing regarding powering the 3B+. It seems the LM2596 supplies up to 3A of current. The Opensprinkler Pi hardware only draws minimal current from the 5V, so nearly 3A for the pi and peripherals seems like way more than enough.
The API allows you to combine two different “pages” of information into a single call. The “yesterday” in the URL gives me data for what happened yesterday. The “conditions” in the URL gives me data for current conditions. Put them both in the URL and you’ll get everything in one API call. Here’s a link to the API documentation: http://api.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs
@mstormo wrote:
Richard,
Awesome software! I just replaced the “dumb” box (a Hunter X-Core, 8-zone) with sprinklers_pi, and it feels liberating!
A couple of questions:
- 1. How do you cancel a Quick Schedule? Rest System on the Advanced page? 😆
- 2. How about showing how long a manual zone has been running on the main page? Right now it just says –:–
- 3. How about taking “tomorrow’s” weather into account as well? I’d hate for it to run a full soak on my lawn when there’s 80% of a Thunderstorm the next day. (I live in Houston Texas, it pours here!)
Again, thank you for your efforts!
1. An easy way would be to cycle the Run Schedules button on the main page.
2. That’s a good idea. On the TODO list.
3. So many people have such wonderful ideas for how to handle the weather. It seems that I should probably make the weather system more easily pluggable module so that people can do what they want. Also on the TODO list.Dexter, the web server is built into the application logic. It’s a very simple web server capable of serving up simple static html web pages, along with dynamic json files for retrieving and storing settings. It will not execute php scripts.
@munga42 wrote:
Looking gd! At the moment I have a float switch in my tank to cut out the pump and restart when tank is full, also a pressure switch on the pump outlet, would this software be able to include these is some way?? I wish to add more zones and I have a pi so this could be a project that I would like to incorporate into my system
Munga, This seems like it would be pretty special purpose and wouldn’t be a feature that a lot of people would use. Keep in mind that you have the full source for the system, so you can do what you want with it. I would probably define a new class with your code in it, make use of the wiringpi libraries to get the state of inputs, and tie into the main control loop in the core.cpp file.
@Splinters wrote:
Hi Rich,
Thanks for taking the time to produce such an excellent control interface for OpensprinklerPi.
I’ve been looking at the way you adjust the schedule using WUnderground and have this question. How does the program adjust for today’s rainfall given that the API calls refer only to yesterday’s conditions?Yes, it looks at today’s rainfall as well. If you look at the WUnderground Check screen (under the Advanced menu), you should see “Precip Today”.
@eddiek2000 wrote:
I have been thinking about your problem and I think the easy answer is to fool the system. Tell it you have 8 zones. Turn off the master zone for all but the last Zone. Use the master zone as your eighth zone.
Brilliant! No code changes and you get a full 8 zones!!
@kenb wrote:
Just started to play with this package on my setup. I have 8 zones and no need for pump so wondering how difficult it is to modify to support 8 zones with the main board. Seems silly for me to need to buy an expansion. 😀
Ken, if you really want to get into the code, and you’re using the OpenSprinklersPi hardware, I think you only need look at core.cpp line 119 and maybe line 122. I believe that if you change the 16 to a 15 in line 119, you’ll have full 8 zones without the pump. I don’t have the hardware in front of me right now so I can’t try it out, but if you’re daring, give it a shot and let us know the results.
Keep in mind that if you make hard changes like this to the software, you’ll have to re-make them every time a new release is created. I will put this on the TODO list because a number of people have asked and it seems that the master/pump feature isn’t particularly widely used…
Mike, your supposition as to the reason you couldn’t add a 10th schedule are correct. I agree that there should be a more intuitive error message and I’ll put that as a TODO. Ultimately I’d like to get away from the opaque binary settings file (which is there to provide compatibility to the Arduino/AVR version of the software) so that we can have more than 10 schedules.
As for your security settings, I have toyed with the idea of putting Basic HTTP authentication into the system. It wouldn’t be too terribly difficult. However, I would be a bit concerned about putting this up somewhere public facing. Better to secure access via a VPN.
@dpackham wrote:
ahh… I follow. one option is to use that web based interface and that will do the logging right?
It’s funny that you mention that. The original version of my code actually logged to cosm.com (which I think is now xively). I got the data to log properly, but I was pretty frustrated with their UI so I abandoned that line of development. that said, it would be pretty trivial for someone to implement something similar. Just implement the Logging class and define LOGGING in your build script.
@dpackham wrote:
can you enable logging with the microsd card?
It’s not the storage of the data that’s the problem. It’s the retrieval. In the raspberrypi version I log the data to a sqlite3 database, which makes quick retrieval based on time/zone/schedule very simple. To do the same thing on the AVR version I’d have to write some code to read the log file and do something similar. Once you get enough events in the file, this might take a while as you’re having to scan in the whole file for every request. Certainly there are some techniques for making this quicker (e.g. break up the file by date), but it’s just time/effort that I have not had the time to put forth…
I looked at the Visual Micro site (http://www.visualmicro.com/) and apparently the Express Editions don’t work. Ugh. Only VS 2008-2013.
If only Arduino had made their stuff build with a normal makefile. OK, maybe I’ll spend a bit of time here trying to get this to compile with the Atmel Studio (which is free). In the mean time, if you happen to have one of the full versions of Visual Studio, have at it!
-Rich
Nick, yes; if the software gets an error or otherwise cannot communicate with the weather underground server then it will default back to 100% of the scheduled run time.
I’m thinking I understand what you’re asking for. If you click on the individual cell in the WUnderground column then it will pop up a box that tells you the overall parameters that fed into that calculation. e.g. the temp, the humidity, etc. Correct? That touches a bunch of code (the core C code, the html web page, and the database table that holds the data), but it shouldn’t be too terribly difficult to do. Let me root around in the code and see what I come up with…
Of course you can always look a the actual program log in /var/log/sprinklers_pi and there should be an error message in there as well as the actual data you’re looking for. If there’s a successful connection, you should get a message that looks something like:
2013/07/27 12:43:42 Adjusting H(-27)T(56)R(-114):15
This states that we’re subtracting 27% for humidity, adding 56% for temp and subtracting 115% for rainfall, resulting in a duration that’s 15% of what’s scheduled. (100-27+56-114). If there was a connection failure or some other failure, there should be an associated message in the log.I don’t have any experience with arch linux, so I’m afraid I can’t help a whole lot there. I looked up some info on their startup scripts and it seems you should be able to get something working with this:
[Unit]
Description=Sprinklers Pi
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/sprinklers_pi -L/var/log/sprinklers_pi
Type=simple
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
triton, moving things to /srv/web/ shouldn’t be hard, but it requires code changes in lines 914 and 915 of web.cpp. The 5s you see in those two lines refer to the size of the string ‘/web/’ which is 5 characters long. If you move things to /srv/web/ then you’ll have to change those to 9s.
You should also increase the length of sPage (declared on line 762) to 39.Ultimately though I wouldn’t recommend this. You’ll forever have custom code on your machine and you’ll have to re-edit things every time we drop a new release. That will be painful. Can’t you just put a symlink from /web/ to /srv/web/??
As for using a relay board, there are a number of posts earlier in this thread on the subject. I know KanyonKris uses one with his system and he’s really helpful. Before I plunked down the money for the awesome OpenSprinklerPi module, I used one of these (http://www.ebay.com/itm/8-Channel-5V-Relay-Shield-Module-For-Arduino-UNO-2560-1280-ARM-PIC-AVR-STM32-/221285941764?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3385ab8204) which worked just fine with the software, but of course it’s big, bulky, uses mechanical relays, and doesn’t have the 24V power supply.
perico: What would be the purpose of simultaneous zones? I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to enable, but I’m having trouble understanding the use case and I’m worried that adding it might cause confusion. I’ve never seen an irrigation timer with simultaneous zones.
I just uploaded the latest build. You can get it here : http://stuff.intelligent-isi.com/sprinklers_pi/sprinklers_avr-1.0.0.tar.gz
It’s built with either the Visual Micro plugin for Visual Studio, or else the version 2012-05-23 Arduino.mk makefile on a linux platform (what a pain in the ass that thing is..)
When you start it up, it currently binds to IP address 192.168.10.20 and port 8080. You can change that via the web page, or you can edit the code to make it something that works on your network.
There’s a tftp server built in to upload the web pages to the SD card. There’s a little bash shell script called xfer that you can use to ease the upload. OR, simply use your desktop to copy the files in the web directory to a /web folder on the SD card.
Good luck!
I apologize that there’s not a whole lot of step-by-step here. If there’s interest I can go into more depth…
2 Events
00:03:21 2013/9/18 (4)
Event [00] Time:04:00(240) Command 3 data 0,0
Event [01] Time:05:00(300) Command 3 data 0,1My schedule runs twice. What does the number in parenthesis mean? If it’s run time, is the weather adjustment applied to both times/runs?
Kris: The number in parenthesis is the structure representation of time (i.e. 240 minutes from midnight…..which is the same as the 4:00 that preceeds it….remember, this is a “secret” screen that I use during debug.) Command 3 means “run a schedule”. data 0,0 means run schedule 0, time 0. data 0,1 means run schedule 0, time 1.
If you watch closely, at 4AM you’ll see a bunch of additional events created. Command 1 means “turn on a valve” (data position 0 tells you which one). Command 2 means “turn off all valves”. The duration weather adjustment isn’t made until directly before the schedule is run (in case there has been some additional rainfall…).
Thanks for updating the wiki!
The two adjustments are both applied. So if one is set at 50% and the other comes up to 200%, the overall adjustment is simply 100% (or no change)
KanyonKris:
It’s something I’ve been pondering. There’s actually a “secret” screen that you can browse to at /ShowEvent which will show you the event queue. That’ll give you an idea as to what’s coming up for the day, but it ends at midnight. (plus it’s very hard to understand unless you’re intimately familiar with the event structure)
This is something that’s high on the to-do list.
v1.0.5 is now up.
Some changes:
1. Fixed bug where certain characters in name fields were not handled correctly. We should be UTF-8 compatible now.
2. Fixed bug where editing on some enabled times was not allowed.
3. Added ability to quickschedule disabled schedules (they show up with the moniker “(disabled)”, but they can be run)Upgrade instructions are on the wiki or in the first post in the thread. Have fun!
I’ve created a wiki for this project at: https://github.com/rszimm/sprinklers_pi/wiki
I’ve also uploaded the source code to github at: https://github.com/rszimm/sprinklers_pi@eddiek2000 wrote:
I “think” 0-99 is a reduction in watering time, 100 is as programmed, and 101-200 would add time to the schedule. I upgraded and went looking for the seasonal adjust and found mine set at 0.
Your intuition is correct!
I don’t know why the seasonal adjust dumped you back to zero on upgrade. That absolutely shouldn’t have happened. Were you upgrading from v1.0.3? Is it possible that you set it to zero before upgrading?
Version 1.0.4 is up. Upgrade instructions are in the very first post on this thread. New features include the ability to do seasonal adjustment up to 200% of normal, and a new snazzy table view in the logs screen that will tell you not only when and how long each zone ran, but how the seasonal adjustment and the weather underground adjustment affected the durations.
Have fun!
