#opensprinkler

Tonight, Mountain View: Rick Talking on OpenSprinkler Systems

Rick’s talking at SVLUG (the Silicon Valley User’s Group) tonight on a topic that’s useful for pretty much everyone in California right now who has a garden: OpenSprinkler and Arduino-based systems. Rick’s done a ton of work on reducing water usage for our garden. (Here’s a super-old post on what we were growing in 2009.) The talk begins at 7 pm and is at Symantec in Mountain View. Directions in…

I'm migrating away from the 'pi for home automation...

Seeing the poor thing sitting at 95% CPU for a month made me feel guilty.

I love OpenSprinkler but don't love open loop control. A small change in the OSPi gpio_pins.py code let me directly drive (and sense!) the pins.

As I have disabled HDMI, I'm using P8_46 to P8_32 to drive the SSRs

Now that the proof of concept works I can build it on a proper PCB.

All that's left to be done is another program to monitor the i/o lines and reset the BBB if the solenoids stay on too long. 

I've really gotten into gardening and water conservation in the last couple of years so it made sense to connect my geek side to my outdoors side. So this weekends project was phase 2 of a 3 phase project.  

Phase 1 which wasn't too technical was buying cheap, but safe, rain barrels, installing a rain sensor on my old sprinkler controller, and connecting an x10 on/off controller to a pump so I could water my garden when I had days that reached 90 degrees outside(via a one wire temperature sensor). The one wire network used a Midon Design's Temp08 one wire serial interface (http://www.midondesign.com/TEMP08/TEMP08.html) connected to a Raspberry Pi via a serial to USB cable.  I then wrote a small Node.js program that would poll the device via the node-serial npm module and then write the temperatures to a mongoDB database out in the cloud.  I'm still working on the integration between this database and the X10 controller.

Phase 2 of this project which I worked on this weekend was replacing my current sprinkler controller with an OpenSprinklerPi (http://rayshobby.net/?page_id=5816).  This was surprising easy to do.  I started by combining my RaspberryPi with Rays Hobby's add-on board and then connected all my sprinkler systems wires(and rain sensor, too) into the new board.  I then downloaded their open source python project and had it all working within a couple of hours.  I was a little worried that combining the one-wire stuff and the sprinkler stuff in one board could cause issues but I've had none so far.  The next phase of this will be to fork the repo (https://github.com/Dan-in-CA/OSPi) and add some of my different one-wire items to the web page.