Details for how Rain Sensor works

[tutqiunnh]

If a rain sensor is connected to SIP running on a Raspberry Pi it will stop irrigation as long as the rain sensor's switch is active.  It is possible to set some stations to ignore the rain sensor or a rain delay on the Stations page.

Internally SIP has 2 variables that control the effect of the rain sensor. They are gv.sd["urs"] (use rain sensor) and gv.sd["rs"] (rain sensed) if both of those variables have a value of 1 irrigation will be stopped. You can find descriptions of the SIP variables in the gv_reference.txt file in the SIP directory.

Currently there is a new SIP extension (plugin) under development that integrates Node-RED with SIP. It will allow node-red to read and set almost all of SIP's variables. That may be something you could use.

Dan

Dan,

   I have been hacking away at creating a plugin for doing rain detect using my weewx weather station for weather data. I have a bash shell script that works by issuing system on/off commands via HTTP GET interface. I have a basic python plugin up and running that checks weather station data and uses it against thresholds set to adjust water level (u"wl") similar to the weather_level_adj plugin. This seems to work for looking at total past rain amounts, forecast rain, and low temperature detection to disable watering. However, if the stations are running and rain is detected during the run adjusting u"wl" does not stop the running stations/programs. I have looked at the check_rain() subroutine in helpers.py and even if I were to set u"rs" with my plugin, check_rain() would override this by trying to check GPIO pins for a rain sensor. I'm trying to find a good work around, but have failed. I have looked at u"rd" (rain delay) but I think it just delays the program/stations for a time delay set via the web page. It seems like I would have to hack the check_rain() subroutine to allow non-GPIO based inputs for rain detect. Maybe the Node-RED update might help, but I'm not sure. Appreciate any thoughts.

PS (as a pleb, the proto stuff was a very good start to getting things up and running, greatly appreciated)

Thanks,
  Bryan