[wateru]

Made more progress and found out the communication failure was due to network issue. Moved both the ESP8266 NodeMCU and the OS Pi to the base home LAN from the Eero network. That fixed it. Have not yet found out why being in the Eero network does not allow these two 2.4GHz devices to communicate with each other. At least I was able to get past the issue and have my sensor talk to the sprinkler and turn on the sprinklers using moisture data. The API works as advertised. Thought I would send in the follow-up in case others have similar issues.

[wateru]

Hi Mike and others,

Thank you for your help. I ordered the parts and feel I am so close to finishing Phase I of the project. The following is what I have done so far and have a couple of questions to complete this out. Please help with the questions.

1. Got OS Pi hooked up in place of our old Hunter controller and it is running my daily program without any issues.
2. Got ESP8266 NodeMCU board and got it up and running with VH400 moisture sensor.
3. The NodeMCU is publishing the moisture data to ThingSpeak every hour.

Remaining steps for Phase I – I need to get OS Pi to use the moisture data and make watering changes. Don’t exactly know how to do this. I have one sensor for the whole house and have placed it at the driest location. I made this the last zone that gets watered so that the safe option is to water.

Now the questions:
1. Where should I edit the program to incorporate the VWC data published to ThingSpeak? In OS Sprinkler code – which .py file should I edit after downloading it from GitHub?
2. I want the logic to be If VWC < dryThreshold, run the regular daily program with no changes; If VWC < mediumThreshold and > dryThreshold, run the daily program at 50% time OR 50% water capacity (either is fine) and IF VWC > wetThreshold, don’t run the daily program.
3. I want to activate this logic at the same daily time I have set in the OS Pi schedule. In other words, simply add moisture as an additional data point to the program keeping the schedule/zone etc. the same. How do I achieve this?

I saw the examples link the forums you pointed me to. In that example I see that the manual program is called if sensor reading is < threshold. This is slightly different that what I want to achieve.

4. Also, in the example it appears the manual sprinkler program call is made in the uController code after writing data to ThingSpeak. What is the point of writing the data to ThingSpeak if the uController is going to act on current data it just read.

Thank you so much for all your help and getting me to this point.

Really appreciate it!!

[wateru]

Hi Mike,

Can the VH400 and the ESP8266 be powered from the same supply? The VH400 says it takes 3.5V – 20V input. The ESP8266 board I ordered is UBB powered so goes up to 5 Volts. Can I tie the VH400’s VIN & GND to the ESP8266’s VIN and GND to power the VH400?

The VH400 analog out is 0-3V and the ESP8266 board’s analog A0 input pin range is 0 – 3.3V, so I think, I can connect the VH400’s analog out directly to the A0 pin on my ESP8266 board – can you please confirm?

Thank you again for all the help.

[wateru]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for the detailed explanation. Will take your advice and use the VH400 and ESP8266. Will get the parts ordered and ask questions as I run into them. Really appreciate this supportive environment!! Thank you!

[wateru]

Hi,
I am a newbie to Opensprinkler. I have written a couple of Arduino programs (very basic) recently and used to write software programs in C 10 years ago. I am trying to see if I can setup a soil moisture sensor with opensprinkler to water my lawn and tie in alexa echo do to get updates on my lawn watering. Also, maybe update the mobile app with any new features I can think of (this is for later).

Can you please tell me what are the best components I should buy to accomplish this? It would be great if you can suggest the moisture sensor as well. Is it better to plug the moisture sensor to a raspberry Pi board and have the Raspberry PI connected to Opensprinkler PI?

Thank you for your guidance. I am a novice willing to put in the effort to learn. Thank you.

[Author]

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