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Sprinkle Project- Tinkering with Irrigation Systems

This project is a series of experiments with irrigration systems. The goal is to achieve the most optimal irrigation at the lowest cost. The system employs multiple Internet weather sources as well as custom sensors to determine whether the irrigation system should deliver water to a particular zone. Generally, the system is run on a schedule. When the time comes to run a zone, the system checks the Internet sources as well as the local sensors. Here is a recent data collected from this decision making process: Data Collection System

Decision processing:

Custom Sensors

The most interesting component of this irrigation system is the dynamic water level sensor. This custom build sensor acts as a switch to indicate whether the system should run or whether the monitored environment has sufficient moisture. This sensor has a float, which is raised or lowered by water collected in the sensor. If the float reaches the top of the sensor, it will notify the irrigation system that it should not run, otherwise it will notify that the system should run. This sensor is filled by rain water or directly by running the irrigation system. The natural evaporation process will remove water from the sensor causing the float to lower. Here is a picture of the dynamic water level sensor installed:

The other sensor pack is a combination of a soil moisture sensor, temperature and humidity sensors. These are installed in the area serviced by the irrigation system. Here are some pictures of this sensor package:

Sensor with protective covering:

Sensor with covering removed:

Portable System

The portable system is designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the irrigation experiments to an audience. It has been utilized at the NYC Media Labs event, to demonstrate how the sensors can impact an irrigation system. NYC Media Labs Visions of the Connected Home

Overview

What is a portable irrigation system? It is a five gallon fish tank, which contains all of the essential elements of an irrigation system. It has a sprinkler head, plumbing and a control valve. All of the components are exactly what one would find buried in the ground. The idea is to demonstrate the electronics and the experiments on this system, without requiring folks to come to a field.

Small scale demo of an irrigation system linked to a home monitoring console. The demo shows the irrigation system with water sensor, temperature sensor, humidity sensor and a custom water level switch. The water level switch is designed to shut the zone off, when the level of water reaches a particular configured level.

The demo system utilizes an Orbit irrigation valve, 24 volt irrigation power supply, zero clearance pool cover pump, Arduino Yun, two solid state relays and a 5 gallon acrylic fish tank.

The home control monitor is run on a Raspberry Pi 2, using Apache, PHP and Tomcat. The Yun provides Restful interfaces for the sensor data. The Yun utilizes a web sockets interface to inform the console of changes to the system state.

YouTube Demo of the System

 Irrigation Demo System  Home Monitor Console Home Monitor Console

sprinkle.txt · Last modified: 2021/06/04 02:16 (external edit)