Once again the summer months have flown by and the vegetables and other plants in my Raised Beds have suffered from a lack of regular watering. I now have the Autumn and Winter months to complete my irrigation Project if next season is to be more successful.

However, progress has been made on the design of the PCB and prototypes have been manufactured although they have yet to be populated with components and tested. Completing the layout and preparing the gerber files took considerably longer than anticipated and, as yet, there is no guarantee that this is error free! So it's back to the 'hot-plate' soldering before the board can be proved.

The firmware fis another aspect of the work still in progress. Programming is not my strong suite so I was very relieved to find a Project on GitHub that looks very promising ad even provides pre-compiled binaries for flashing to the ESP8266-12E. Although it would be too much to expect that it will fulfil the Requirement without any modification it will certainly form, with Node-Red and the other supported features a good basis for the Project. My PCB is an adaptation of the board designed for the Home Automation Project that is fully documented on the http://tech.scargill.net blog pages that are the work of Peter Scargill and Adian Ruff .

Work outside has continued and I now have the irrigation piping in place (buried) and two of the Solenoids mounted adjacent to their respective Raised Beds. Now, before the Winter sets in I need to clear the ground of this year's 'failures' ready for a new season in 2017 with automated solar powered irrigation.