Irrigation-Controller-powered-by-ESPHome

frieduser · March 12, 2024, 6:13pm

Irrigation Controller powered by Home Assistant and ESPHome Sprinkler Controller integration By Andrea (frieduser)

I learned a lot along the way and I thank all who gave me inspirations on solving issues; special thanks to @Alaric (who inspired me for the ESPCode), @ThaNerd (helped with lovelace interface)

Overview

I’ve done a tailored irrigation system on my needs, leveraging on:

Esphome sprinkler controller platform Sprinkler Controller — ESPHome
Home Assistant Automation
Irrigation Dashboard with some HACS addons
Single package file with all configurations (input_*, statistics and automation)

I’ve a 4 zones lawn and two other zones: flowerbed and strawberries.

My needs

What I needed is:

Schedule with a time for a single irrigation in the day
Frequency in days: every day, every two days and so on
Disable a specific day, for example on Saturday if I know I’ll have a barbecue with friends; the irrigation will be done the following day
For lawn, that has 4 zones, leveraging on Auto Advance option available in esphome/sprinkler, we can schedule just the lawn, not every single zone

Other features

Other options:

There’s a system to count rainfall in order to avoid watering (postponed) or decrement irrigation time (in %, using multiplier_number in esphome)
There’s a flag to enable a zone – or the lawn – to be rain aware for what available in previous point
It’s possible to enable/disable scheduler
The chance to watering manually
Set up irrigation time in minutes with limits (60 min in my setup)

HACS addons

I’ve used:

custom:button-card
custom:numberbox-card
custom:slider-entity-row
custom:time-picker-card

Please add-on them before enable dashboard

Components

There are three software components of the irrigation systems:

irrigation dashboard
irrigation package is the core:
- automation are triggered on time, then it evaluates (conditions) weekday if it’s enabled, in the actions parts:
  - evaluates full rain day (match on number of tips to avoid irrigation) in order to set skipdays variable
  - evaluates not enough rain (less than number of tips needed) to set progressive irrigation (in %)
  - then irrigate, under certain conditions
irrigation esphome code
The hardware components are:
esp32 board, mine is POE
rele board, powered at 12VDC
Optocoupler board, translate 12VDC pulses to 3.3VDC logic
Tipping Bucket Rainfall Sensor - powered at 12VCC because of long distance (>3m), so no false pulse are recorded

Screnshots

Please see:

Lovelace screenshots
- Irrigation
- Rain section (with some controls for testing)
- Maintenance dashboard
Notification examples
Esphome code (I’ve used POE ESP32 platform)
- Rain gauge (reed switch to count every tip) has been used with 3.3V/12V Optocoupler – no need to debounce pulses
- I’ve not used counter integration because I’ve preferred to leverage on home assistant statistics

All needed here:

Some screenshots are better than more words:

Main Dashboard

Rain Dashboard

Settings Dashboard

please pay attention on “Lawn Auto Advance” binary switch used to watering all sprinklers under a controller

Message Dashboard

(not used at the moment)

Persistent Notification

Here you can find irrigation messages on delay, execution and future schedulings

Irrigation package:

add Studio Code Server add-on for your convenience

ESPHome screnshot:

Just to show a part of the code

Some pictures of the project:

Happy to answer to your questions.