Arduino irrigation issues

[alowhum]

Hi Adam, if you have a raspberry Pi I would recommend installing Domoticz on it. It's one of the better options for beginners as it has great MySensors support built in.

More on Domoticz here

[Stephen205]

IObroker or openhab will work as a replacement controller for Vera.

[dbemowsk]

@alowhum Unless things have changed I don't know if Domoticz is a good choice for this. Back when I was using Domoticz with my irrigation controller, I had issues with the V_Var1-3 values for setting the zone names and times. It has been a while since I have used Domoticz, so there may have been some updates that have fixed this that I am unaware of, so if there is, someone can chime in and correct me. I don't know what other controllers support the V_Var values.

[alowhum]

Why would you need V-Var values?

I know that Domoticz is one of the few to support the INFO field well, meaning it's easy to store variables that way.

Domoticz is the most user friendly system, with out of the box support for MySensors. And that says more about the state of the open source controller ecosystem than anything :-(

[Adam]

Thanks for all the info guys. I ended up buy the Vera and it seems that I am having trouble with the serial gateway. I have the gui17 my sensor plug in loaded correctly I think. The plug in pops up but can’t detect device is showing or a lua start up fail. Then once I was able to get the serial gate to talk to Vera showing the six functions and the node but never was able to get the lcd display or control anything. I will mention that I am using a pro mini as my serial gate not sure if nano is still the ONLY microcontroller that can be used.

[dbemowsk]

@alowhum The V_Var values are what let you set the watering times as well as the zone names that get displayed on the LCD from the controller side. Having this functionality would allow you to adjust the watering times based on weather data using a LUA or other controller based script. If you didn't have the V-Var values, you would have to hard code the watering times in the sketch and if you wanted to adjust them, you would have to modify the sketch and re-upload it.

[alowhum]

@dbemowsk Ah, sorry, I didn't realise this referred to a specific sketch. My bad.

[dbemowsk]

@alowhum Unless it has changed, the original sketch in the build section had this. Here is an example from one zone from my Vera setup.

Variable1 - 3 correspond to the V_VAR1 - V_VAR3 values.
V_VAR1 sets the zone run time when triggered automatically.
V_VAR2 sets the run time for when the zone is triggered manually from the buttons on the controller.
V_VAR3 sets the name that will be displayed on the LCD screen on the controller.

A few years ago when I was running Domoticz, I had some crafty LUA script with a custom sketch that let me do this to a point, but it was quite cumbersome. Getting my Vera Plus controller made this much easier.

[Stephen205]

IObroker or openhab support V_VAR and the original sketch works on both controllers, at least for me it does.

[dbemowsk]

I was hoping back then that Domoticz would get on the wagon and add support for these, but they never did. Unless they have done something recently, I haven't used Domoticz in a few years. It's good to know that there are others out there that do support this.