Irrigation Controller Uses Google Calendar To Make Things Easy

February 20, 2020 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

Irrigation controllers have been around for a long time, often using similar hardware inside that would be familiar to the average maker. However, many of the products on the shelf at your local hardware store can be quite expensive for what amounts to a microcontroller, display, and relay board. [oscillatory] had such a rig, but wanted to bring it into the 21st century, IOT style.

The existing Holman irrigation system consisted of a control box, hooked up to four solenoid valves controlled by relays. [oscillatory] decided that replacing this with something fancier would thus be straightforward. A relay board packing an ESP8266 was sourced, and flashed with the Tasmota firmware. This was then hooked up to run off the Holman’s 24 VAC supply via a CCTV power supply, allowing the new controller to be run in parallel with the existing hardware, just in case. Scheduling is then controlled by Google Calendar, in concert with Home Assistant.

[oscillatory] now has a watering system that can be controlled over the web, and without the need to install any custom apps. Simply creating a calendar entry is enough for the system to spring into action. We’ve seen others use a similar approach, too. It’s a great example of using off-the-shelf parts to whip up a useful custom home automation setup!

Vinduino Water-Smart Farming – Now With LoRa!

October 25, 2018 by Roger Cheng 9 Comments

Our five rounds of Hackaday Prize 2018 challenges have just wrapped up, and we’re looking forward to see where the chips fall in the final ranking. While we’re waiting for the winners to be announced at Hackaday Superconference, it’s fun to take a look back at one of our past winners. Watch [Reinier van der Lee] give the latest updates on his Vinduino project (video also embedded after the break) to a Hackaday Los Angeles meetup earlier this year.

Vinduino started with [Reinier]’s desire to better understand what happens to irrigation water under the surface, measuring soil moisture at different depths. This knowledge informs more efficient use of irrigation water, as we’ve previously covered in more detail. What [Reinier] has been focused on is improving usability of the system by networking the sensors wirelessly versus having to walk up and physically attach a reader unit.

His thought started the same as ours – put them on WiFi! But adding WiFi coverage across his entire vineyard was not going to be cost-effective. After experimenting with various communication schemes, he has settled on LoRa. Designed to trade raw bandwidth for long range with low power requirements, it is a perfect match for a network of soil moisture sensors.

In the video [Reinier] gives an overview of LoRa for those who might be unfamiliar. Followed by results of his experiments integrating LoRa functionality into Vinduino, and ending with a call to action for hackers to help grow the LoRa network. It sounds like he’s become quite the champion for the cause! He’s even giving a hands-on workshop at Supercon where you can build your own LoRa connected sensor. (Get tickets here.)

We’re always happy to see open-source hardware projects like Vinduino succeed, transitioning to a product that solve real world problems. We know there are even more promising ideas out there, which is why Hackaday’s sister company Tindie is funding a Project to Product program to help this year’s winners follow in Vinduino’s footsteps. We look forward to sharing more success stories yet to come.

Continue reading “Vinduino Water-Smart Farming – Now With LoRa!” →

Fail Of The Week: Arachno∙fail∙ia

June 23, 2016 by Mike Szczys 84 Comments

Going down the list (FCC, CE, UL, etc.) we can’t think of a regulating body that will test for this failure mode. Reportedly, a $1M irrigation system was taken down by a spider. And an itsy-bitsy spider at that.

This fail turned up as a quick image post over on /r/mildlyinteresting but I wasn’t the only electronics person attracted like a moth to a flame. Our friend [Sprite_TM] popped in to answer a question about conformal coating. Seems this board was sealed in a waterproof enclosure but was obviously not conformally coated.

[Sprite_TM] also helped out with some armchair-engineering to guess at what happened. It’s not hard to tell that the footprint on the board looks like a set of mechanical relays all in a line. He looked up the most likely pinout for the relay.

We’ve superimposed that pinout on the board to help illustrate the failure. High voltage comes in on the pin shown with the red trace leading away from it. On either side of that pin are the connections for the low voltage coil which switches from normally closed (the pin in the upper right that is not connected to anything) to the normally open pin (which has the wide trace leading away from it).

So there sat the high voltage pin in between the coil pins when, along came a spider. It shorted the pins and presumably all the way back to the power supply for the low voltage rail. [Fugly_Turnip] (the OP) share some additional detail about the system and this failure; in addition to this card it fried the control module as well.

Another comment on the same thread shares a different story of two boards mounted next to each other with a bug shorting a 1/4″ air gap between two boards and causing similar carnage. Have you encountered Arachno-fail-ia of your own? Let us know below.

Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which celebrates failure as a learning tool. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your own failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.