Raspberry Pi based open sprinkler?

[plantidip]

I finally have a Raspberry Pi being shipped to me and one of the things I'd like to do with it is run my sprinklers. I've just started going of the docs but was wondering if anyone else was looking adapting this project to a Raspberry Pi?

-Liam

[Ray]

Hi,

That's an interesting idea. I've actually been thinking about that since the first time I saw Raspberry Pi. While it can significantly improve the capability of OpenSprinkler, I decided not to pursue that direction because of several reasons: 1) I don't want OpenSprinkler to depend on a crucial part that can be severely short of stock; 2) relevant to 1) I also don't want the project enclosure design to have to consider a part that I have no control over (say, if they decide to change the form factor of their board); 3) using raspberry Pi only replaces the microcontroller and Ethernet controller, you still need to build a circuit board that holds the rest of the circuit including the LCD, solenoid drivers, screw terminals, power conversion etc. So this would end up being less economical than an integrated design. 

-Ray

[hstearnsjr]

I'd like your opinion on another thought I had regarding processor selection for new projects. For several years I worked at Intel and Marvel on their "Smart phone on a chip" projects, what they call Monahans ( in Blackberrys ) and Tavor ( PXA930 ).

These are amazing chips, fast, low power, low cost, two ARM cores + signal processor + about every peripheral you can think of, e.g. onewire, I2C, uarts, LCD video controller, parallel ports, timers, camera controller, audio codec, video codecs, DDR controller, flash and static RAMs, touch screen interface and more -- just about all you'd need for a "cell phone on a chip" except for the RF front end.   It's easy to run Linux on them.

The disadvantages: 

320 pin ball grid chip about 12mm on a side -- but you can buy cell phone development boards, e.g.Enfora.

No ethernet, at least on the ones I'm familar with.

Unbelievably complex programming -- the programmers manual is a phone book sized 2300 pages long!

Way more powerful than you need.

Maybe it would make sense to just buy cheap cell phones and interface to those.

On Sunday, June 24, 2012 2:10:29 PM UTC-7, Ray wrote:

Hi,

That's an interesting idea. I've actually been thinking about that since the first time I saw Raspberry Pi. While it ...

[Ray]

I just finished a sprinkler extension board for Raspberry Pi. It's called OpenSprinkler Pi. You can check it out at:

http://pi.opensprinkler.com

On Sunday, June 24, 2012 4:28:58 PM UTC-4, Plastidip wrote: