djsmith42 / isprinkle

iSprinkle

This is iSprinkle, a pet project for controlling my home sprinklers with Linux, Python, OpenWRT, USB, iOS, and my own sweat.

I can say with near 100% confidence that unless you know me personally, you probably don't want to be here.

However, if you like pain, here's a description of this software:

isprinkle-server

• The Python scheduler that runs on the control computer (an OpenWRT board in my case).
• Provides a very basic, unauthenticated web service to set up watering schedules using YAML.
• It's almost RESTful, but the URLs are RPC-style.
• Uses pickles to persist the watering schedules.
• Shells out to isprinkle-control to actually turn on and off sprinkler valves.
• Seems pretty stable. I've left it running for months at a time with no problem.

isprinkle-control

• The C program that turns on and off the USB relays that control my sprinkler valves.
• Requires a very specific version of libusb (included) and libftdi (also included).
• Must be cross-compiled for the embedded board using OpenWRT's build system.
• Might compile on regular PCs with Linux, but recently it has been failing to build for me on Ubuntu.
• Designed to support a lot of valves (I have 16, but it's designed to support hundreds).
• Has a very basic command line interface that lets you do the following:
  1. Turn on a single valve at a time
  2. Turn off all valves
  3. Display status of which valve is currently on

isprinkle-pyqt-gui

• A prototype GUI built with pyqt that never came to fruition.
• Left here for sentimental reasons only.

isprinkle-iphone-gui

• An iOS project that allows one to configure the watering schedules and see current status.
• Not my finest work, and it seems to leak memory if left running too long (i.e., many hours).

isprinkle-webclient

• React based web front end
• Work in progress (about 50% complete)
• To run it:
  1. Edit config.js to match your iSprinkle device IP/hostname
  2. cd isprinkle-webclient
  3. npm install
  4. npm run dev
  5. Point web browser at: http://localhost:8090

openwrt

• My OpenWRT configuration (about a year old now).
• Includes a file-system overlay for customized configs.

cron

• Just an example cron job for using isprinkle-control directly without the Python scheduler and web service.