Dumbed down OpenSprinkler Hardware?

[Shawn Mix]

So I've been looking around and reading up on the OpenSprinkler stuff and I must say it's a pretty awesome little piece of hardware and the binding makes it even more amazing. I've seen the examples illustrating how to perfectly balance the watering time with other factors like sun, rain, time of day, etc. For me, I've got a pretty simple setup that doesn't require multiple zones, special controls, or anything of that sort. While OpenSprinkler is great, I don't need to spend $150 on something that I might be able to do with less brains in my situation.

What I'm looking for is if anyone has any knowledge of a basic water shutoff valve, or something simplistic enough that could be used as an electric shutoff valve. My thought here is I've already got ZWave plugin modules that I can simply plug the electronic valve into. When power goes on, open the valve, power goes off, close the valve. This way I can simply turn the water on/off on a timer, and I could potentially use some of the extra calculations to make a smarter sprinkler system out of a simple one. The area being watered by this is just simply the front flower beds which we just put in this year with 2 sprinkler heads connected above ground.

Any thoughts, ideas, or devices anyone can think of that could easily be rigged together before I jump into $150 for an openSprinkler along with a valve that needs hooking up too?

[Greg]

You can use a standard irrigation valve and control it with a wall wart plugged in directly to your z-wave outlet.  Just make sure your wall wart matches the specs of the irrigation valve.  These are usually 24VAC, although there are 18VDC and 9VDC ones available as well.

[Ben Jones]

The Fibaro 2x1.5kW relays can be powered using 24VDC so if you can get hold of some 24VDC solenoids you can have a single power supply running to your controller box which will power both the relays and the solenoids. Using the 2x1.5kW relays you get two for the price of one, but it sounds like you only really need one?

But as you say, once you have the solenoids controllable by openHAB you can write rules to do whatever you like. I have a setup using a Raspberry Pi and a 4xrelay board wired to the RPi GPIO pins. I have a simple Python script running on the RPi which subscribes to a set of MQTT topics, then when I want a sprinkler to turn on openHAB just publishes a 1 to the appropriate MQTT topic, 0 to turn off. Works like a charm - no issues for over 12 months!

My irrigation rules were published in my 'sharing config' thread a while back - but basically will turn off if there has been rain in the last 24 hours, or rain is forecast (from Wunderground weather feed). I intend to enhance this at some point, by adding some soil moisture sensors and feeding this back into the irrigation calculations...

Would be interested to hear of others irrigation rules...

[Shawn Mix]

These both sound like great ideas. I'm going to work on getting a solid configuration for the actual sprinklers first before I dive into it, but preemptively I figured I'd ask in case there were already some type of IoT or Connected devices for this purpose vs the larger cost of the OpenSprinkler. I may look at experimenting with a simple Arduino controller too if I can find a basic low voltage ZWave of Wifi based device to hook into and use the signaling. This way I don't even need to run a wall plug (since I was just realizing there isn't one close to where the faucet is) and then have to fight with running water to the power supply area just to feed into a valve.

@Ben - I did see your config for the sprinkler as well and I like the idea. I'm not quite there with all my rules and my understanding/coding properly to write the similar rules, but it's coming along. An uphill process for sure, but a fun one! Especially on a Friday night with a couple beers!

[Greg]

You can make something close to the opensprinker with an arduino, ethernet shield, and relay shield.  If you install the tinyrest library, then you can control it from openhab with the http binding and rules.  You will have to run a ethernet cable.  If you want to go wireless, then your complexity starts climbing quickly.

[Shawn Mix]

@Greg - ya I had thought about a basic but I'm looking more for a completely wireless option with a battery pack. I'm contemplating using some of the work illustrated in this instruct able: http://www.instructables.com/id/Uber-Home-Automation/?ALLSTEPS - he has a great base system centered around OpenHAB and basic Arduino sensors. I'm thinking I might be able to build off of it, but it seems it will definitely be time consuming (despite how easy it looks) to get connected. I'll shelf it for later on when I start moving along further through the winter with other projects.

[Ben Jones]

Shawn - I have just built a remote gate sensor using the stuff Eric did (from your link) as a guide. I ended up using the Moteino boards which are pretty good value and have one running on a 9V battery monitoring my gate status with a reed switch.

Happy to share the sketch if you are interested, the gateway node is another Moteino hooked up to an Arduino UNO clone which has onboard ethernet. The gateway receives the RF packets via the Moteino over I2C and transforms them to MQTT publishes which openHAB is listening for. Works very well, but this is only one way communication. I should be able to get very good battery life since the remote Moteino is put to sleep in between gate open/close events, so doesn't draw much power.

If you wanted to use these for an irrigation controller system you would have to have the Moteino radio on the whole time, listening for RF packets turning your sprinklers on/off. This would no doubt drain your battery very quickly.

You will need to have power to your solenoids, to drive them, so I would highly recommend you use that power to drive whatever you are going to have controlling them also.

[Shawn Mix]

This sounds like a good idea Ben, I may take you up on this later when I get around to ordering an arduino or 2. I will admit I haven't really tinkered with them yet, RPi was as far down that road I've gotten. :)

I did have a thought though that may be able to reduce the necessity of the battery usage through the radio. I imagine there may be an ability to store some basic data on the Arduino such as perhaps a simple date/time and action instruction? So perhaps if I can setup my OpenHAB to use the TCP binding and let it extract updated information based on things like a generic schedule, recent weather (Rain) and/or other factors, I could program it to check with openHAB basically before watering. So in essence it can run if no connection is made (something goes wrong on wireless) and if it does connect, it can be set for a cron job (say 30 minutes before scheduled to run) that can check in with openHAB, validate no changes, or take any changes, then run itself. Though as I describe this, I'm starting to think that's what was programmed into the OpenSprinkler. :-P So perhaps I'll leave it at the basics with simple wall wart to start with, and work from there.

[Markus Hahnenkamm]

Hello openHAB Community,

Like in the german forum where the community participation for my topic seems to small, i now wanted to ask you:
http://knx-user-forum.de/forum/supportforen/openhab/825069-gartenbew%C3%A4sserung

I'm currently only controlling my Christmas lighting via MQTT and an Arduino. MQTT was OK and you have a good separation of the devices, but it seemed to me too flexible and you can never easilly figure out, that the device has received the command. On top of that the device has to know the address of the server )-:

So this spring to summer i want to control my watering via openHAB. I already tried to build my own one but i couldn't establish series-production readiness and so a simple China Solenoid Valve was controlled via a time switch.

Concerning the realization i'd like to know how you have somehow integrated your self-constructed components in your environment? Actually there are only needed some little commands to be transferred from the leading layer to the decentral arduino control:

• Opening the valve with some Timeout:
  
• Close valve
• acquire current flow speed
• null flow counter and read the count
• Maybe some error handling like no flow or to much flow

And finally there's the implementation of the Leading layer - the only schedule control technology i figured out was the Google calendar, but you can smuggle in any code which will then be executed )-:

So do you have some ideas how this could be usefully controlled - even by untrained personnel (like my mother who just use the Computer to play solitaire)?

Greetings, 
Markus from Germany