I’m curious if any of you have done anything with OpenSprinkler? I’m looking at replacing the sprinkler controller at my parent’s place (30 years old!) and this looks like a cool little product… as opposed to the similarly capable, but massively overpriced OTC versions.
Ironically I bought an RPi B+ for $20 the other day as they were on sale at Microcenter and while I was using it to learn something else, this looks like a perfect project to start and make something that’s actually functional.
Any comments about OpenSprinkler are greatly appreciated.
I don’t need the LCD, and just paid $95 for the Controller and power supply. Add that to the $20 for the RPiB+ and ive got an extra wifi dongle and microSD, so for $115 and some installation, I can have a google calendar controlled / wirelessly accessible Sprinkler system.
And it’s a fun project
I’ll update when I install this… Sadly it doesn’t ship until next week so it gives me some time to play around with it first.
Ah. Missed that.
That does make more sense, but still not exactly “cheap”.
Of course, it’s been a while since I checked out sprinkler controller pricing, so they may have gone up.
It is a nice feature/function set for the $$, based on my (very) cursory overview.
I’ll be interested to follow along…
I’m always wanting to upgrade my old rainbird because it has volatile memory, and resets to a really stupid setup, spraying water all over the place 3 times a day in the middle of daylight hours… very frustrating.
If this goes well, they may have made another sale…
Sprinkler controller? I would just buy a cheap relay board off Ebay, then interface it to the PI and write some custom code to click relays in whichever combination/timing that you want your sprinklers to run. You could probably use the power supply that is in the existing controller.
I did something similar but only one channel to open my garage door remotely from my Pi.
Well, I guess I should read the DMS boards before embarking on new projects. My existing irrigation controller went south and I picked up a RPi A+ and a $10 relay board for replacement duty.
See this thread for relay
My plan is to use one of the Weather APIs to determine if the system should water or hold off in anticipation of rain, and then check if it actually rained the previous day. I have java/groovy background, so I’m using pi4j.
Initially, the watering schedule will be driven off a config file, updated via SSH. Once everything’s rolling, I’ll think about a more sophisticated UI. With the UI comes the choice of either running a web server on the RPi (and attendant security considerations) or hosting the config file on one of my remote web servers and having the RPi operate as a http client only.
