Latest geek project - One wire / OpenSprinklerPi / Ugmo
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.
Phase 3 of this project is where the real water savings will come into play. I had a friend in the irrigation business provide me with an Ugmo PH100 (http://www.ugmo.com/products/ph100) to test for him so I'm going to install this in the next few weeks. This product actually senses the moisture in the soil and will only allow watering if the soil is dry. I think it should work pretty seamlessly with all the other items.
