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Automatic Irrigation control

What do you do with an automatic irrigation controller that has gone wrong? Put an ESP8266 in it of course.

acuarioAcuario
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A few years ago I bought several cheap automatic irrigation controllers for my vegetable garden. Slowly they stopped working, mostly with a 'low battery' fault (new fresh batteries but the controller thought they were exhausted so stopped working).

They are simple devices that run on 3V and have a motorized valve to turn on/off the water. The shaft from the motor to the valve has a cam on it that operates a micro switch to indicate if the valve is open or closed.

The controller can easily be replaced with (in my case) an ESP-08 using one of the GPIO lines to monitor the switch and another via a transistor to operate the motor.

The new controller can be programmed via its own web page and exploits the ESP deep-sleep to give long battery life.

Initially I tried with an ESP-01 but the problem I had was that I needed 2 GPIO lines, one input, one output. The input was fine but the output was a problem as I needed to drive a transistor and the output was being dragged low causing the ESP to hang during reset.

Schematic.pdf

Schematic diagram

Adobe Portable Document Format - 29.22 kB - 09/04/2017 at 11:27

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  • Project progress

    Acuario • 09/04/2017 at 11:33 • 0 comments

    4-September-2017

    It became evident that trying to synchronise time and control by time without using an RTC would be complicated. To keep the unit synchronised it would need to sync to an NTP time server. This would mean connecting to the WiFi and would shorten battery life (the unit is not always in range). This defeated the low power usage.

    As a result I decided to abandon 'real time'. It is, after all, a basic watering system so time of watering and duration isn't that critical. So a new implementation that just sets the watering duration and (approximate) delay between cycles in hours. Also this meand so need to actívate the WiFi RF side so more power saving.

    Software is nearly ready, just a few things to clean up.

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