I'm off to town to do food shopping and grab an automotive relay which is the final thing I need to run the water pump on the controller(by day for now).Well that and after a few hours of pulling my hair out, I figured out my 12 volt house wiring has some bad wires. Yes, we have 12 vdc house wiring from when this place was off grid.
I'm using this controller instead of the square one with the backlit LCD screen.
I grabbed some old red LED lights that I had and have those turning on for 10 seconds and off for 10 seconds. Took a little bit to figure out how to that. You can turn things on/off or pulse them on/off. I found the pulse time duration setting. The LEDs are pulsing on for 10 seconds and is set to repeat every 20 seconds.
Now I can set it to pulse on for 2 minutes and repeat every 30 minutes. The settings also allow for time of day and start/end dates.
I'd been thinking of pulse as something that lasts for a second or so because in automation, it often simulates someone pushing a momentary button or pressing a key on a keypad.
Turn drip irrigation on for 30 seconds every 5 minutes. Started at 6:40am and ended at 7:10am.
It's still just running LED lights instead of the pump. Gotta crawl under the house here shortly and run new wiring to the pump. Then I can reset the start/end times on this schedule and it's watering time.
The setup page above is accessed through a browser and the connection is Ethernet but it's strictly a local network. The controller has it's own mini web server software built in to serve the setup/control pages.
No one can hack into my home/industrial automation gadgets. Connecting to them requires being physically plugged into the network via Ethernet cable. The network hub I bought is an industrial unit and has an operating temperature range of -40 to +175 F and will live in the high tunnel. Controller, power supply, network hub and automotive relay will get mounted on the wall in the house for now since the little garden is right here.
This ControlByWeb controller doesn't have analog input capabilities so I can't connect the soil moisture sensor to it. I can read it with a multimeter for now. The other controller does have two analog inputs but requires writing ladder logic code. That will be an ongoing learning curve/project. I did figure out timers well enough to do the above irrigation schedule with it but for now, will use the easy one to keep the difficult one freed up for learning/programming.
Done with coffee. Time for socks, shoes and a crawl under the house.