SIP travels to Arica Chile - a 16 Stations installation

[Matias]

Hi there!
          As Im finishing my SIP controlling box and I found some spare time, Its time to show my SIP project...
 
           The SIP box will control the irrigation of half an hectare  (1.23 Acre ) in Arica, Chile, where it never rains and we are completely dependent on the irrigation.
 In the land we have almost 50 olive trees, 20 fruit trees (mangoes, chirimoyo, citrics, etc),  20 meters of passion fruit, 1000 square meters of vegetable orchard. All of those need different amount of water at different schedules, as we are not living there yet and it's 15kms away, it a major pain in the .....  We are now loosing almost 10hs weekly just to keep the plants with water! 

 To irrigate, we have a pond that receives water once a week, a 2HP pump and a mainline ring around the land of 63mm PVC Pipe. From that ring now we take 50mm pipe sidelines with manual valves and finally a awful mesh of  1/2 inch pipe to the drip irrigators. 

 As we now have a clear plan on how to use the land, we added 4 manifolds to the mainline ring with 4 1inch electro-valves each, dividing the land in 4 big sectors.  From there we plan 13 irrigation zones, keeping 3 for future use (most likely for some sprinklers when we finally build our house there)

(I will post some pictures of the hydraulics later)

Now, finally, the control box:



 This two buttons are the last thing that i'm coding, I need to manually stop SIP and start the well pump. Im extending the lcd_adj plugin to do this, I will post the code it as soon as is ready.

Its guts:



On the left the i2c LCD,  3G modem, i2c GPIO Extension extension and below a Raspberry PI.  There is some room to eventually add a i2c A/D converter and add some sensors.
The modem will be only used with the sms_adj plugin and a simple script to put the internal clock on time. I found that It do not worth the effort to put the box online.

On the right the Relay Boards, the 24vAC transformer andtwo 5v power sources, one 2amp for the PI and a 1amp for the relays and GPIO extender, with only one, the PI would hang when I open more than 5 relays at the same time. 

I did some soldering under the relays to make all share the 24Vac current, as they all be driving valves:




The software is a fork of SIP that Im working with Dan to integrate it to upstream, the code is in GitHub


I will be installing the box in the next couple of weeks, I hope everything goes as planned and I do not blow all my pipes or kill the pump...


 The next planned upgrade is to add a pressure sensor to monitor the hydraulics and prevent that the pump or the pipes gets damaged.

  Here Im thinking in using and independent system based on an arduino, to monitor the pressure and a additional relay to cut the power to the pump. I could event connect the arduino to the Pi with i2c to log the pressure and stop SIP in case of problems.

The other upgrade planned is to add another relay to drive a valve that injects some liquid fertilizers  that are needed for the olive trees.

I will post later some details of the hydraulic and, hopefully the final installation onsite.

Regards

--
Matias - Arica, Chile
matiasv@gmail.com
https://github.com/Pelado-Mat/

[dan]

Thanks for the interesting post.

According to the Wikipedia entry for Arica it is considered "the driest inhabited place on Earth, at least as measured by rainfall":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arica#Climate

I think many of us who also live in arid climates can learn from your experience.

Dan

[Matias]

According to the Wikipedia entry for Arica it is considered "the driest inhabited place on Earth, at least as measured by rainfall":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arica#Climate

I think it's true, the city gets its water and food for this two narrow green valleys in the middle of the desert (called "pampa"):
   

In the bottom of each valley there is a river that runs dry almost 10 month a year, but there is an aquifer that runs underground from the Andes.