You can’t easily upgrade/update the OSPi software when you have an OSPi network, since upgrades are normally conducted over the Internet. You need frequent in-place software/firmware upgrades.Similarly, you can’t have log files forwarded to you. They aren’t connected to the Internet, and hence you can’t administer devices on them via the Internet. Ad hoc networks are by definition standalone. For example, you might have a rental property, whose grounds are watered by an OSPi system, and you don’t want the unreliability (or liability) of connecting the OSPi to the tenant’s WiFi network. In some cases, an existing WiFi network isn’t practical to access. The existing WiFi network isn’t useable.An OSPi network is useful in cases where there is no existing network Why would you do this?Ĭonsider setting up an OSPi ad hoc network (we’ll call this the OSPi network) if: I was looking in Amazon today just an hour ago, a dripping system and now I found this article.Once you connect to the network, you open the Open Sprinkler App (or Web UI if using a laptop) to administer Open Sprinkler. I have my Raspberry in the box for months and so far wanted to do something related to the garden with it, but don't knew what exactly or how to start. The hard part is ensuring that you are not giving your plants too much or too little water, dripping in a reasonable place, not flushing your plants, etc. I have found that unless you are growing a shitload of stuff, you're better off just using a "manual" drip system - buckets with gravity feed and a nozzle along with a little twist valve to control drip rate.Or just manually watering. You can set up a manual drip system with almost nothing. Pieces of wood, cheap plastic valves, 5 gallon buckets, nails, tubes. You can get things like little water probes that you stick into the soil and try to get readings but you will quickly discover that the amount of water it picks up in spot A will not always be correlated to how much the plant it's sitting next to needs or does not need water. Then you come to the realization that the easiest way to solve this problem is to just go look at your plants. Which is why I'll be using my Raspberry Pi to take a picture of my plants every minute this summer in a weather proof box. I know this sounds out of left field, but if you are really looking to harness automation to help you grow better and more efficiently, I would say using it for documentation is your best bet. Take tons of pictures, and log all the fertilizers you give, pesticides (if any), watering amounts and frequency, etc. That way when a problem comes up, you can look at the pictures and see the problem beginning and compare this to what was happening at the time with your notes.ĭrip systems are nice, but even if your garden is ridiculously massive, it doesn't need to be a complicated system and controlling it will never be a bottleneck. It's a cute/fun project though.įirst thing I thought as well. The exciting thing about the new connected sprinkler controllers like the rachio and others is that they know the weather and what works for the location you're in. That makes using it just about foolproof and can save water which translates to money. While this might be a fun project it doesn't add any value over just reading the manual on how to operate a sprinkler controller with a dial. It's really not that hard or time consuming to figure out, especially for a geek. Watering lawns is an egregious waste of water. If you live in an area where you need to water your lawn, give up on your lawn. Or at the very least plant drought-tolerant grass that can go for weeks without water once established. I live in a large desert and I'm plum flummoxed by the number of people here growing Kentucky Bluegrass and watering it at least once a week, two or three times a week during the hottest part of summer. We grow a large vegetable garden, all watered by drip tapes, the kind where we manually flip a valve for each bed. The reason we do it manually is because some crops use more water than others and some areas dry out faster so not everything needs watered at the same time.
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