Integration with Orbit B-Hyve Irrigation System

try turning off smart watering.

Turning off Smart Watering has no effect… Strange… I’m on firmware 0039, which I thought was the latest (hardware: WT25G2-001).

Did you add a (or multiple) device(s) to a zone?

Not sure I understand your question. It’s been configured years ago, with one valve per zone.

from the home screen select the drop-down under the b-hyve logo and select one of the devices as the active device. Then, tap the “zones” option at the bottom of the app and post that screen shot.

Like this?

yeah, interesting. It looks like you don’t have an active device selected. I’m not exactly sure what the problem might be though as I’m using hose timers which I understand function a bit differently than other orbit hardware.

I asked B-Hyve to update the firmware on my devices which they did remotely. This then allowed the ‘Preset Runtime’ setting to stick. Prior to this the “manual_preset_runtime” would not change from 600.

" Using the B-hyve app you can set how long you want the preset manual cycle to run for. Go to Settings>Devices>Device>Preset Runtime. Default runtime is 10 minutes".

I’ll put in a service to enable turning on a zone with a custom time - this is fairly straightforward and won’t rely on the manual_preset_runtime setting which is configured in the BHyve app.

Separately I’ll also see if it is possible to create a new service to set this manual_preset_runtime value :slight_smile:

I check this forum occasionally, if you have any other feature requests I will see them immediately if they are raised in the github repo: https://github.com/sebr/bhyve-home-assistant/issues/

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Hey all,
I’ve released 0.2.0-alpha.6 which contains the following new features:

  1. switch entities to toggle device rain delay functionality on/off (defaults to 24 hour delay)
  2. switch entities to toggle device programs on/off (must be configured in the app)
  3. Integration services which provide functionality to:
  • Start watering with custom watering time
  • Stop watering
  • Enable rain delay with a custom time
  • Set the preset runtime of a device (i.e the default duration of a zone when watering starts)

I’ve taken the opportunity to clean up a few of the entities for consistent naming. It’s possible that HA will create new entities when upgrading to this version and you may need to do some cleanup. Please let me know if this occurs so I can get the release ready for a GA.

In order to install this pre-release version, you’ll need to enable beta versions for the integration in HACS. Here is an explainer of how to do this.

Looking forward to your feedback!

I’m curious how the preset water time (I’m assuming the same attribute as previous version?) interacts with the stop watering service. For example, what happens if you call the service before the preset watering time expires? Conversely, what if the preset watering time expires before the stop service is called? If it maters, I’m using hose timers only in my configuration.

If the timer expires, the watering stops.

If the stop watering service is executed, watering stops.

If watering is not active when either of these two actions occurs, nothing happens. It’s not possible to have multiple timers running

How is the Rain Delay sensor supposed to work? It shows up, but doesn’t seem to track with changes to the Rain Delay settings in the App. For example, right now the app doesn’t show a rain delay in effect, but in Home Assistant, if I click on the badge in Home Assistant it says it’s on. It says that it was turned on manually a couple of days ago (which is probably correct), but doesn’t reflect that I turned it off again. Does it only poll occasionally (it’s been hours since it changed)?

The rain delay entity should reflect state changes immediately.

I have seen. The occasional bump if HA’s internet is disrupted - this can cause the integration’s event stream to lose connectivity. A restart should fix that.

I would suggest enabling debug logging and watching the log for event notifications.

Hi there,

first of all, thanks a lot for the helpful information regarding the Orbit API. I’m about to implement a module for FHEM. Therefore, I wanted to try the websocket connection first from my browser (https://www.wss-websocket.net/), but unfortunately did not get any response (token und device_id are known). Did anyone already suceed in opening an ORBIT websocket connection via a browser?

Sure, works no problems. You can see this in action at https://techsupport.orbitbhyve.com/

Great tip! Inspecting the website did the trick!

I was confused that I did not get any response neither to the authorisation message nor to a ping message. Moreover, I tried to start watering with
{“event”:“enable_flow_sensor”, “device_id”:"…", “duration_sec”: 30, “interval_ms”: 1000}
which did not work.

Turning smart watering off and using
{“event”:“change_mode”,“device_id”:"…",“timestamp”:"…",“mode”:“manual”,“stations”:[{“station”:1,“run_time”:1}]}
is what finally worked for me.

Hi @sebr,

Thanks so much for this. It’s great! I had some issues with zones starting with the 2.0 update, (just toggling the switch didn’t seem to work) I’m unsure why, as I rolled back to 1.0 to get things working again. I will try the update again soon. However, I had one main question:
Is there a way to force and update to the sensors names and remove old names? I moved some tap timers around, and changed the names, but they aren’t reflected in the home assistant sensor.

Cheers, and thanks again for developing this!

Oh, sorry to hear that! If you can inspect your logs and track anything down that might be useful I’d be happy to take a look. Please raise an issue on github :slight_smile:

Unfortunately there isn’t a way to force sensor name updates other than to reinstall - disable the integration, restart HA, remove the unavailable entities, enable the integration and then restart again. Sounds more complicated than it is :slight_smile:. I’d recommend you do this after upgrading to v2.0 as the entity unique_id values changed and cleanup would be required regardless.

Sweet. Thanks. Didn’t even know you could manually delete entities! Went through that process and updated to 2.0.1 and all seems to be working again with new names!

Took a little bit to figure out the naming of the switches for the b-hyve tap timers since each device is a single zone and the default name for that zone is ‘zone’ - no matter the name of the device.
So by default you might end u with a bunch of switch.zone_zone, and switch.zone_zone_2.

But if you rename the zone name to the device name, you’ll get more useful switch names switch.backyard_side_zone.

Thanks dude. Really appreciate the development.