2017 Mar 09, 07:11 PM
Thanks for your great input. I was quickly reading through your sample Arduino codes. They look very advanced :-) I think you did very similar things that I am planning to do.
Up to now I used the Raspberry controlling a 4 channel SainSmart Relay directly (via transistors) through GPIO pins and a simple time based shell script. But as I need to increase the number of valves and want to include sensors, GPIO does not scale as I need too many cables and the garden is big. I was looking for a robust 2 wire bus. While for a short time thinking about 1-wire, I finally ended up with RS485 and modbus. The last weeks I spent sorting out the proper library for both the Arduino and Raspberry. There are many different ones. But I like the minimal approach of MinimalModbus and SimpleModbusSlave.
I am actually just starting playing around with SIP. I am planning to use the current GIT version of the python port: https://github.com/Dan-in-CA/SIP
I am using SainSmart relays to control the valves. As I read they can be connected directly to the Arduino (200mA).
The signaling capability to the plugin sounds interesting. Is the number of valves limited by the number of GPIO pins by default? But I guess as a starting point that should be fine.
Up to now I used the Raspberry controlling a 4 channel SainSmart Relay directly (via transistors) through GPIO pins and a simple time based shell script. But as I need to increase the number of valves and want to include sensors, GPIO does not scale as I need too many cables and the garden is big. I was looking for a robust 2 wire bus. While for a short time thinking about 1-wire, I finally ended up with RS485 and modbus. The last weeks I spent sorting out the proper library for both the Arduino and Raspberry. There are many different ones. But I like the minimal approach of MinimalModbus and SimpleModbusSlave.
I am actually just starting playing around with SIP. I am planning to use the current GIT version of the python port: https://github.com/Dan-in-CA/SIP
I am using SainSmart relays to control the valves. As I read they can be connected directly to the Arduino (200mA).
The signaling capability to the plugin sounds interesting. Is the number of valves limited by the number of GPIO pins by default? But I guess as a starting point that should be fine.