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Announcing OpenSprinkler Beagle (OSBo) v1.0

Nov 15th, 2013 by ray

OpenSprinkler Beagle kit is available for purchase at Rayshobby Shop.

Following the sneak-peak preview, I am excited to announce that OpenSprinkler Beagle (OSBo) v1.0 is now officially released! OpenSprinkler Beagle is an open-source sprinkler / irrigation extension board for the BeagleBone Black. It uses four GPIO pins to control an unlimited number of sprinkler valves. Using this board, you can easily convert your BeagleBone Black into a low-cost, web-connected smart sprinkler controller. You can use online weather data to help regulate sprinkler water time, and remotely change settings and programs when you are traveling away. Best of all, it’s an open-source project — you are welcome to tinker with the hardware and/or software to create your own customized sprinkler controller.

The idea of OpenSprinkler Beagle came from the OpenSprinkler Pi, which is a sprinkler extension board for the Raspberry Pi. Since OpenSprinkler Pi was released earlier this year, it has been a very popular product. Over time I’ve received requests from users to develop a similar board for the BeagleBone Black. While the BeagleBone Black is similar in nature to the Raspberry Pi (i.e. both are low-cost embedded Linux boards), it offers some interesting benefits such as a large number of GPIO pins, build-in analog pins, build-in eMMC, microSD card slot (i.e. smaller profile). faster CPU etc. Undoubtedly it makes sense to develop an OpenSprinkler variant for the BeagleBone Black.

The hardware design of OpenSprinkler Beagle is similar to OpenSprinkler Pi: it contains a 24VAC to 5VDC switching regulator, shift register, triac, DS1307 RTC with CR1220 battery, zone expansion board connector. It also currently shares the same enclosure as OpenSprinkler Pi. But it also offers several improvements, specifically:

Added a total of 10 bidirectional TVS for protection against transient voltages: one for each of the eight stations, one for the 24VAC port, and one for the rain sensor port.
The BeagleBone Black is now plugged down into OSBo, and all GPIO pins are mapped out to the pinout area.
Added a 5V mini-relay for more general-purpose switching. The relay has a contact rating of 120VAC / 2A. It can be used for switching low-power lighting, or garage doors etc.
The 24VAC terminal block is changed to orange color with 3.96mm pin spacing. This helps prevent incorrect connection to other terminal ports. There is also a solder-on 2A fuse on the 24VAC line.
Added a rain sensor port with pull-up and current limiting resistors.

Below is an annotated diagram that shows the various components of the board:

OpenSprinkler Beagle Homepage

Below I am going to give a very brief overview of the hardware and software setups. For details, please watch the tutorial video above, and visit the official OSBo homepage at http://beagle.opensprinkler.com.

Hardware Setup

The hardware is pretty easy to set up. The kit comes with an assembled OpenSprinkler Beagle circuit board, enclosure, screws, terminal blocks, and extra pin headers in case you want to map out additional GPIO pins. In addition, you need to provide a BeagleBone Black, a nano-size WiFi dongle, and a 24VAC sprinkler transformer (these are not included in the kit and need to be purchased separately). The board makes use of the first 2×10 pins on port P9 of the BeagleBone Black for interfacing with shift register, RTC, rain sensor port, and mini-relay. Plug in the BeagleBone Black into OSBo, connect the 24VAC power, plug in the common (COM) wire and individual station wires, and that’s it. The interface is the same with other sprinkler controllers. If you have a rain/freeze sensor, you can connect it to the rain sensor terminal.

Software Setup

Follow the recent update on OpenSprinkler Pi, the software setup for OSBo has also been made a lot easier. Specifically, I’ve created a SD card image with pre-installed software. Download the image, burn it to a microSD card, pop it in to your BeagleBone Black, and you are ready to go. The pre-configured SD card runs a Ubuntu operation system (default user name ubuntu, password temppwd), and sets Dan’s interval_program to start by default. As soon as the system has booted and is up online, you can open a browser and type in http://x.x.x.x:8080 (where x.x.x.x is your BeagleBone’s IP address). This will bring up the interval program’s web interface. The interval program has a rich set of software features, such as setting multiple sprinkler programs, preview programs, run-once program, manual operation, logging, rain delay etc. The details are all explained in the user manual of the interval program.

The SD card has also pre-installed Samer’s mobile web app, which provides a nice front-end for mobile devices such as pads and phones. It is available at http://x.x.x.x/sprinklers.

In addition, there are three demo programs installed in the /home/ubuntu/demos/ folder. There is a self-test program, a relay test program, and a Google Calendar-based sprinkler program, which makes use of a Google Calendar for scheduling water events. I’ve received many good comments regarding the Google Calendar-based program — while it looks simple, it’s quite convenient to use and very suitable for the less technical minded people.

Since the software is pretty much all adapted from OpenSprinkler Pi, feel free to refer to the OpenSprinkler Pi documents if anything is unclear. I will try to make the OpenSprinkler Beagle website more self-contained, and it will have to be polished over time.

Naming

In the previous post, I asked for naming suggestions. Thanks to everyone who made comments there. After careful thoughts, I’ve decided to use the full name OpenSprinkler Beagle, and short name OSBo. Particularly, the short name OSBo is picked because it goes well with OSPi (OpenSprinkler Pi), is easy to distinguish with OSBee (openSprinkler Bee), and Bo is a name of a dog. So overall I consider this to be the top choice.

Thanks for reading this post. If you are interested in buying the OpenSprinkler Beagle, we have a limited number of kits immediately available, at the first link below. Feel free to leave comments and suggestions below or at the Rayshobby Forum.

Links

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Mission Accomplished — From Michael Wilson, an OpenSprinkler Pi User

Nov 13th, 2013 by ray

An OpenSprinkler Pi user Michael Wilson sent me this nice illustrated document he wrote about setting up OpenSprinkler Pi and the mobile web app. He successfully installed OpenSprinkler Pi to replace his previous Toro controller. The document has somehow slipped out of my mind and has been sitting in my mailbox for a few months. I should have posted it when I received it! Anyways, thanks Michael for sharing it with us!

Download as PDF

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OpenSprinkler Paper Box and New Zone Expansion Board Enclosure

Nov 12th, 2013 by ray

This post is a direct update of the post I wrote in September during my visit to SeeedStudio. Today I received the official sample of the OpenSprinkler paper box. Check the photos below. Very cool!

The paper box was designed by SeeedStudio, and hopefully it will give OpenSprinkler a more professional touch.

The other piece of news is that we’ve finalized the new zone expansion board enclosure design. This is going to be injection molded soon. Below are pictures of the 3D printed prototype. The style follow the OpenSprinkler injection molded enclosure, so they will have a consistent look. The new design allows 16 stations per zone expansion board, yet the board size is roughly the same with the current 8-station zone expansion board. So it’s really really compact. This will probably become available in the first quarter next year.

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OpenSprinkler Pi (OSPi) Pre-Configured SD Card Image for Download

Oct 30th, 2013 by ray

Update: information on this blog post is outdated. Please check the latest instructions in the OSPi v1.4 user manual.

Good news to OSPi users: a pre-configured SD card image is now available for download at the following url:

OSPi SD card image (June 25, 2014)

SHA1SUM: 1cc26d3271b6dad35f0bc423412981530da5de41
MD5SUM: cbb0e246f6daf0db68d68c7f0731e78d

NOTE: OSPi v1.4 requires either a microSD card or a low-profile SD card (due to the limited space in the enclosure). A microSD card adapter for RPi is included in the kit.

The image is compressed from an existing OSPi installation that contains Dan’s interval_program, Rich’s sprinklers_pi program, Samer’s OpenSprinkler mobile app, and the Google Calendar-based scheduling program. Download it, burn it to an SD card, and pop it in to your Raspberry Pi. Then you will be ready to go right away. No more pulling your hair or banging your head against the wall (well, hopefully :))!

The process to burn the image to an SD card is the same as burning a raspbian image to SD card. If you’ve used Raspberry Pi before, you’ve probably done this already, maybe even multiple times. If not, you should check the detailed online instructions here: http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup

Here is a quick summary:

Decompress the image file to your computer.
Insert an SD card (4GB or above). Make sure you back up any important file on the SD card as the procedure below will overwrite the content on the SD card.
Depending on what operating system you use:

On Windows, use the Win32DiskImager software.
On Mac, use the ‘dd’ command in a terminal, for example: sudo dd bs=1M if=name_of_the_image_file of=/dev/partition_to_burn_to
On Linux, the same, use the ‘dd’ command on a terminal, for example: sudo dd bs=1M if=name_of_the_image_file of=/dev/partition_to_burn_to
VERY VERY IMPORTANT: make sure you have selected the correct drive name (or partition name) to burn the image to!!! If you’ve selected the wrong drive, you might end up wiping out your computer’s hard drive, and I am sure you will be back pulling your hair again!!! Double check before you press enter or click on confirm.

Once the SD card is ready, pop it in to your Raspberry Pi. Since WiFi is not configured yet, you should first connect it directly to your router using a wired Ethernet cable. Alternatively, if you are a Linux user, insert the SD card to your computer, and you directly edit the WiFi SSID and password in file /etc/network/interfaces on the SD card (not your computer!). This way when you pop it in to RPi, it will automatically connect to your WiFi network.

In your home router’s configuration page, find out the IP address assigned to the Raspberry Pi. Next, open a browser, and type in:
http://x.x.x.x
where x.x.x.x is your Raspberry Pi’s IP address. You should see a page with further instructions, such as setting up time zone, WiFi etc. If you can see this page, congratulations, you’ve succeeded!

Dan Kimberling’s interval_program is set as the default program to run on start-up. Type in the following url in a browser:
http://x.x.x.x:8080
(again, x.x.x.x is your Raspberry Pi’s IP address) and you should see the web interface of the interval_program.

The OpenSprinkler mobile app is also pre-installed to the SD card, which is available at:
http://x.x.x.x/sprinklers

You can also switch to run Rich Zimmerman’s sprinklers_pi program on start-up. To do so, ssh (or use a monitor and keyboard) to your Raspberry Pi (the system uses the default user name pi and password raspberry) and run the script in a terminal: sudo /home/pi/select_program. Once you’ve switched to the sprinklers_pi program, you can access its web interface at the same http://x.x.x.x:8080.

These have all been explained in the one-page instruction. For questions, comments, and suggestions, please post them at the Rayshobby Forum: http://rayshobby.net/phpBB3. Thanks!

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OpenSprinkler Pi (OSPi) has a New Enclosure Option

Oct 24th, 2013 by ray

We’ve just got a new batch of enclosures for OpenSprinkler Pi (OSPi). The dimensions are the same with the transparent cover enclosures we’ve been using so far, but it’s now in solid color (light gray) and comes with a printed label on top. The picture on the left below shows the new enclosure. For comparison, the picture on the right is the current one with transparent cover.

The label makes it clear where each connector is located. Also, an additional cutout is included in the left-hand side to allow an Ethernet cable to pass through. This will be useful for anyone who wants to stick with wired connection. The pictures below show the two pieces of the enclosure and the assembly from three different sides:

A little bit history about this: the transparent cover was originally adopted because it’s exactly the same enclosure used for Arduino-based OpenSprinkler DIY kit. There is a good reason to share the enclosure as it saves cost of having to making a new design. Now as the OpenSprinkler DIY kit will soon step up to use the injection molded enclosure, it’s time to give OpenSprinkler Pi a dedicated ‘shirt’, so that the cutouts can be more tailored to OSPi.

Anyways, the new enclosure option is compatible with all existing versions of OSPi. If you’ve purchased an OSPi in the past and prefers the new enclosure, you can purchase it separately from the store link here. Thanks!