berkinet wrote:...* Well, it is possible to get the data online, but I could never get curl to get through the authentication process on the CIMIS web site.

Cancel that. After writing that I decided to give it another shot.

Good news. I got it working. You still need an account on CIMIS, but you can now use curl (in a shell script) to pull the data on demand instead of processing an incoming email message.

Wow! Productive day for you... Do you do this stuff professionally? I'm amazed at your output here. Thanks for being such a generous resource to this community, BERKINET. I can see that this is going to be a great source of joy (and a time intensive one) for many years to come.

Also nice to see siteadmin Jay so responsive. Perceptive Automation rocks.

jay wrote:I use the rainfall rate from my weather station hardware via the WeatherSnoop plugin to skip watering if the 2-day total is over a threshold.

What I intended to do was a little more sophisticated; I had started to set up a daily rain variable for each day of the week (updated from Weathersnoop at 11:59 pm) to allow me to get running total of the rain for the past week weighted to favor the most recent days, but got lazy after putting in the EZFlora seems to have ended our drought... when I replaced the old manual box the weekend after Thanksgiving, we were under water resrictions that only allowed my address Tuesday and Saturday watering because we had only had 15 inches of rain in the first 11 months of 2011. We got 2 inches on that Monday, and have recieved another foot of rain since... so maybe I should have put in the new controller sooner.

Washing one's car works incredibly well here in Montana to bring rain.

Carl

The Master Irrigation plugin, version 1.0, is now available in the User Contributions Library..

For those interested in controlling their sprinkler system (using the Master Irrigation plugin, or not) I have posted some documentation on the system I am using to the Master Sprinkler announcement forum.

Pardon the pun, but I'm trying to 'soak' all this in. I'm setting up a single EZFlora (I have 8 physical zones on my system), and now working to set up schedules.

My previous scheme with dedicated sprinkler controller:
Restrictions:
limited to certain days of week, and certain hours of day, based on city code, and wind that usually picks up in the afternoon.
Setup:
All zones but one, run every Tue, Thur and Sat
All zones run short duration, 3 times on each watering day (soil doesn't absorb quickly, so multiple short durations needed to avoid runoff, while still putting out proper amount of water)
One zone covers a small garden, rather than lawn, and hence runs every day, same short duration and multiple run times

Now I'm trying to determine whether the regular sprinkler controller schedule, or your sprinkler plugin, will yield better results for me.

It looks like with the regular controller, I could do 3 scheduled start times, and give each zone a run time in that schedule. It looks like I'd have to do that for the stand alone zone as well. This seems familiar, compared to the way my dedicated sprinkler controller works.

For your plugin, it looks like I'd have to setup individual schedule for each zone, for each start time, maybe setting each one to start immediately for a set number of minutes? It's confusing my on the zone setup, having to specify a number of run minutes for each day. While I do know how many minutes to run each zone each day, it's broken up over three different run times, and it doesn't look like I can tell the virtual zone device that. In the virtual zone setup, would I actually enter the number of minutes for each start time, and not the actual total number of minutes of run time per day? An then do 3 different schedules to start the daily irrigation?

gtreece wrote:...For your plugin, it looks like I'd have to setup individual schedule for each zone, for each start time, maybe setting each one to start immediately for a set number of minutes? It's confusing my on the zone setup, having to specify a number of run minutes for each day. While I do know how many minutes to run each zone each day, it's broken up over three different run times, and it doesn't look like I can tell the virtual zone device that. In the virtual zone setup, would I actually enter the number of minutes for each start time, and not the actual total number of minutes of run time per day? An then do 3 different schedules to start the daily irrigation?

Your assessment is accurate. At this time the Multiple sprinkler plugin only supports 1 scheduled run per day. You might find some work-around, but I doubt it will deliver what you are looking for.

I am working on the next version which will support up to 3 runs per day, and will also allow scheduling from within the plugin -- no need to create Indigo schedules. I should have the next version ready within the next 2 weeks.

Awesome. I appreciate your work.

@berkinet,
I am having issues with the Master Irrigation plugin. I set it up to work with two EZfloras (11 zones) and on the first day of the schedule it ran successfully, but it now fails every morning with the error "Master Irrigation Error Irrigation schedule already running. Action request ignored.". Any thoughts?

Past 3 days logs http://cld.tmass1.com/2K0d3g1Z0D2b1a0p1u05

In looking over the logs it seems like something else is also starting the EZFlora:

Code: Select all

2012-04-16 06:20:37   Master Irrigation   Irrigation ended for zone Zone 7
2012-04-16 06:20:37   Master Irrigation   Starting irrigation for Zone 8(output 7), for 15.0 minutes
... ...
2012-04-16 08:17:36   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone4" on (ack: valve 4 on)
2012-04-16 08:18:10   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone4" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 08:18:10   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone1" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 08:18:11   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone2" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 08:18:11   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone3" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 08:18:12   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone5" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 08:18:12   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone6" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 08:18:12   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone7" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 08:18:13   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone8" off (ack: all valves off)
... ...
2012-04-16 19:07:49   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone7" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:07:49   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone1" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:07:49   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone2" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:07:50   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone3" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:07:50   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone4" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:07:51   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone5" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:07:51   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone6" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:07:51   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 1-8 - zone8" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:07:53   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone2" on (ack: valve 2 on)
2012-04-16 19:07:54   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone1" on (ack: valve 1 on)
... ...
2012-04-16 19:09:23   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone2" on (ack: valve 2 on)
... ...
2012-04-16 19:10:02   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone2" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:10:03   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone1" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:10:03   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone3" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:10:03   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone4" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:10:04   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone5" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:10:04   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone6" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:10:04   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone7" off (ack: all valves off)
2012-04-16 19:10:05   Sent INSTEON   "Sprinkler Zones 9-11 - zone8" off (ack: all valves off)

Notice that the plugin says it is starting Zone 8 at 06:20:37 - but nothing happens. Then at 08:17:36 valve 4 is turned on, apparently from the Indigo Xlient, though that is not 100% clear.

BTW, note there is a small bug in the logging of the "output" number, it is 1 less than it should be.

Check that nothing else is starting the EZFloras and restart the plugin and see what happens.

Hi!
How does this field get populated?

Wunderground_Precip_today_in
irrRainPrevDay
irrRainPrevDayAM

kidney wrote:Hi!
How does this field get populated?

Wunderground_Precip_today_in
irrRainPrevDay
irrRainPrevDayAM

Wunderground_Precip_today_in is set in the second code snippet in the second post in this thread. The other two variables are set in the third code snippet.

I have been running it for a few days and it has never been populated.....
In this code?
for this variable Wunderground_Precip_today_in

Code: Select all

-- Change curlArgs to contain your location
set filePath to "/var/tmp/RainForecast"
set curlArgs to "-m 45 http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Metro_Oakland_International.html >" & filePath

-- Now, get the raw html with curl…
do shell script "/usr/bin/curl " & curlArgs

-- … and parse it for the rain forecast
set rainPct to do shell script "/usr/bin/grep -A5 -m1 fctDayConditions " & filePath & "|/usr/bin/tail -1|/usr/bin/cut -d\\> -f2|/usr/bin/cut -d% -f1"

tell application "IndigoServer"
   set the value of variable "irrRainForecastPCT" to rainPct
   log "Set rain forecast % to: " & rainPct using type "Rain-Forecast"
end tell