Using weatherbug data

[ryarber]

I am looking to use weatherbug to control my EZRain. Could someone post some guidelines on how to use things like wind, rainfall, avg temp, humidity and things like that to control the irrigation?

 

Also any other ways you are using Weatherbug would be interesting as well.

 

Thanks.

[GPG]

ryarber,

 

In my area the sprinkler will not be activated until next month, but I have been doing some testing in the mean time.

 

Since the Weatherbug info resets at midnight, it is easy to prevent the sprinkler system from running if the rainfall during the early morning has been over a certain amount, say 1/8".

 

I also want to be able to determine if the rainfall the previous day has been say more than 1/4" regardless of whether it rained since midnight. I run a program to test for this at the end of each day, then incorporate this in my run sprinkler program.

 

Anther thought I had was to use the temperature to trigger which sprinkler program runs, one for 20min on cool days and one for 30min on hot days. Another idea would be to run a second watering in the afternoon on days where the temperature exceeds say 95 degrees.

 

By the way, I am sort of getting used to using programs as variables, but it would be so much nicer, if we had some ability to store real boolean and integer values. I know this was mentioned a long time ago, and must be really far down on the priority list, but it is still on my wish list.

 

thanks,

George

[ryarber]

A while back, I saw the mods saying that they were looking at doing something with variables in 2.8. Exactly what they are going to do, I have no clue. But it would be nice if they would allow us to use the data from weatherbug to calculate a variable that would be a sprinkler runtime modifyer variable so that when the variable is calculated, it would be a decimal value between 0 and 1. We could set up a basic sprinkler schedule of say 25 minutes per zone for grass and 10 minutes for flower beds and then have this change based on the sprinkler runtime modifyer.

 

I've used this setup on my mac using indigo and it works really well.

[Michel Kohanim]

Hello ryarber,

 

Variables are - as you might imagine - a little more difficult than other development efforts especially when constrained by memory and resources (unlike Indigo). Rest assured we are working on it and it will be close to what you have in mind.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

 

A while back, I saw the mods saying that they were looking at doing something with variables in 2.8. Exactly what they are going to do, I have no clue. But it would be nice if they would allow us to use the data from weatherbug to calculate a variable that would be a sprinkler runtime modifyer variable so that when the variable is calculated, it would be a decimal value between 0 and 1. We could set up a basic sprinkler schedule of say 25 minutes per zone for grass and 10 minutes for flower beds and then have this change based on the sprinkler runtime modifyer.

 

I've used this setup on my mac using indigo and it works really well.