We Are In Control

Noel has spent the last couple of weeks building me an irrigation controller. Yes, of course you can buy them, but the controller my system required cost a lot of money (think around $1000 for the number of circuits I have in the garden). Noel spent about $100 on materials for this one. And I can log in and change the programming over the web, should I require such intervention.

Here's my irrigation hero wiring the board together. It even has a nice blinking red LED.

Once he'd finished the wiring for the board, he fitted everything into this nice little metal box.

Even though we had the box sitting around from another project and it certainly was not the plan for this to happen, the pieces of this controller fit perfectly inside the box:

Then Noel spent an hour wiring all the valves to a single large cable that would run into the box. He's applying heat-shrink tubing here, to protect the connections from the weather.

We did some testing this afternoon and it works like a charm. Right now, the controller is programmed through a command line, but eventually he'll make it so there is a neat little user interface for me to use.

After we got that working, we went under the house and finished running the PVC for the last three circuits. The next major move is to get that water tank here and installed. Also, I need to do some more research on pumps.

Technorati Tags: irrigation

posted by ayse on 07/29/07