Thank you for coming up with this solution, Angelo. I will probably be able to check if it works in a few months. The setting is a real remote one (more than 200 km away) at my family's house. Currently Covid19 forbids me to travel there but I will let you know when I get to test it.

Hi,

Indeed I see the very nice moisture sensor graph. So I think that the point 1 is already addressed. I recognize that the interface of autowatering is a little complicate, if you need further explanation, let me know.

In case you set-up the email, you can also see that the system will send you messages in case of anomalies with the sensor reading.

So let me try to address the second part of the automation, so the activation of the valve for 600 seconds 15m after the pump finish its activation.

This is not completely managed by SW, you require a jumper wire between two GPIO pins.

1) Select a GPIO PIN which is not already used, if you use the Automation board there should be 4 GPIO pins readily available, which are shared with the Relay2. (GPIO 18,14,04,15). Assuming that you are not using relay2, go to the "hardwaresetting" page, "edit table" and remove the 4 rows with PIN 18,14,04,15.

2) For convenience we associate a power pin to the pump, this will replicate the behavior of the pump pin. Go to "hardwaresetting" -> "edit table" locate the pump row and set the powerpin field to 04.

3) Let's use as interrupt PIN the GPIO14.

4) Connect with a wire the GPIO14 (input) and GPIO04 (output).

Now we require to setup the Interrupt in the "hardwaresetting".

"edit table" and add a row with the following parameters:

To check what has been done so far is working, you can go to "setting" page and read the "Pumpinterrupt" when the pump is off, then read it again when the pump is activated. You should see 1 and 0.

If it works, then the next step is to configure the interrupt to activate the valve with a delay.

Go to "interrupt" page, select the relay which is activating the valve and set the following:

Duration of Blocking period is set to 15 minutes 60x15=900sec (previous SW release was in minutes, the latest release is in seconds, so it depends on your SW version if it is in minutes or seconds)

Follow-up activation is 600 seconds.

Of course you can play with smaller numbers for testing purposes.

Unfortunately, currently I could not test this setting in my environment.

Let me know.

Regards,

Angelo

Hi,

yes, I am aware that 1) can be realized with the autowatering setting. I just did it and it worked fine. I just had the pump working for only half the time as usually (I was worried I might would forget about it and overwater the plants). However, below is a former graph (as I have been testing for a few months already). Thats how it should look:

1. Trigger threshold can be around 25-30% moisture.

2. Pump activation was 6 min in total (360 seconds) - I was mistaken in my first post.

3. Valve actuation was 600seconds (2x) ca. 15 min after step 2.

Then you see a nice slow increase in moisture level to 55%.

Hello,

I'm also thinking to implement the Ebb and flow system for my young plants before I transplant them.

Back to your points:

1) This can be done using the autowatering setting according to the moisture sensor, I see no problems here.

2&3) For this one, I think we can use the GPIO pin that activate the pump to trigger an interrupt on another GPIO pin. This means that two GPIO pins have to be physically connected by a wire. After this connection, it should be possible to setup the interrupt to set the valve in blocking state for 15min and then follow-up action to activate to N seconds.

If you want to give it a try, we can start with the setup of the point 1). If you can post the graph of the moisture sensor so to check which might be the activation thresholds.