Garden Irrigation, Pt 1

Some more background to my 'home assistant powered irrigation system' -- I'll write up a couple more articles as build progresses - I'm still waiting on some critical parts to arrive, like PVC pipe fittings and an Arduino Mega.

The Grand Plan.
The 2 main garden bed areas need to be automatically watered. The small 'hexagon' area contains 6 raised beds and a small central area. The main veggie patch (still being built. slow progress...) is around 20 beds. Later automation will include more smarts (hooking in my rainfall sensor, some buried gypsum sensors and soil temperature monitoring), but for now, the priority is to save on the 30-60 mins with a hosepipe in the evenings. Oh, and we're on tank (rainwater collection) water, so wastage is bad mmmkay.

The irrigation units themselves won't be 'smart' - All they need to do is send valve (relay) status, and respond to controls. I have an internal MQTT message broker, so a basic arduino + ethernet shield + 8 channel relay board does the small bed, and an arduino mega + ethernet (or an ethermega) + 3 8 channel relay shields the main veggie patch.

Sample arduino code is available on GitHub, (functions? who needs functions...) and yeah, it's not elegant. While it follows the syntax for the home assistant MQTT switch device, some of the defaults aren't the same, so I need to explictitly set them for now in the hass config. such as

switch:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: Hexagon bed 1
    icon: mdi:water
    availability_topic: status/hexIrrigation
    command_topic: control/hexIrrigation/valve1
    payload_on: "1"
    payload_off: "0"
    state_topic: status/hexIrrigation/valve1
    state_on: "On"
    state_off: "Off"

You can see here that I use status/hexIrrigation as LWT (so I know if the controllers on/offline) as well as the the relay state. I'm only using retain on the LWT, not the valves themselves. Power cycling the unit will (should!) reset back to all solenoids off, but I don't yet check and publish this, so hass may get confused if it loses comms. "Fixed in the next release" apparently :-)

I also want to integrate a flow sensor into each unit if possible (suspect I'm running out of digital IO on the small unit) to get an overall volume of water that's gone into the garden - fed, as normal into grafana.

I'll throw in another couple of postings (with pics) as the build progresses. but today I had an audience while working on the fence... (it will be fully netted to keep out the possums, pademelons and our hens)

All around the water tank, waiting for the rain...

Having the luxury of mains water means that I don't really care in fanatical detail about the state of the dam water levels for Perth (except that "it's lower than it should really be"). However with our new place being entirely dependant on rainwater collection off the roof into storage tanks, I'd like to know the levels of the various tanks (and therefore the volume remaining).

So, what's available - simplest is knocking on the side of the tank and guessing from the sound how full. Not terribly reliable or hi-tech, but is cheap. Dipstick also cheap, but requires removing filter cover. Next up are external gauges - Our tank supplier stocks the Yaktek Levetator, but that's not really any good when I'm not on site. Hence, it's time to investigate the electronic options:

This thread on whirlpool mentions the Electrosense Aquagauge, but at $265 each plus telemetry thats not cheap. The Jaycar ultrasonic one may be OK, but as it doesn't have a serial / usb  output from the display, I'd need to hack up something to parse the RF (as others have done). So datasheet hunting time:

The MaxBotix series looks like it's pretty much ideal - 1mm resolution, 5m max range, weather resistant. Annoyingly I can't see it cheaper than the ~100 USD on the manufacturer site (sparkfun et al. only have the MB7360 not the MB7369), but at least there's a local supplier.  A slightly different model (MB7060) is being used by the flood network.

Next up is trying to work out how to connect them - My options are:

• Wired - Etherten or possibly something as simple as serial-ethernet adaptor
• Wireless - wemos / ESP8266 for wifi (power hungry?)
• Wireless - rfm type TX/RX setup to basestation
• lora - nice but possibly expensive as I'd need a gateway.

I suspect this particular blog entry will get updated as things progress..