Smart Garden Tap Water - On and Off

I recently have a second problem inconvenience.
I use the waterOff notification to store the “volume” and “velocity” for that watering, but regularly that velocity is zero. First it was only one linktap with 20% battery, but now a second one had the same issue.
I also noticed that the watering shows a normal velocity until the very end of the watering, than the linktap sends a “back online” notification and a “waterOff” notification with the faulty velocity.

I just want to say thank you for the awesome integration! I much prefer it over the MQTT. Thank you!

Completely agree that this is amazing. Great idea to get the volume units from the gateway and use that on the device config entry. I am wondering if you’d like help to expand this to make a bit more universal. For example, I need one of my taplinkers to run longer than 120 minutes and so needed to make a change in number.py to make max time longer than 120 and show as a box instead of a slider on the device configuration page as once a slider’s max time value goes over 120 it is quite hard to dial in the proper number.

Im not particularly wed to how the duration is entered, My 120 minutes was a somewhat arbitrary decision.

Having it go all the way down to 5 potentially doesnt make a heap of sense, so maybe its better to make it start at 30 and go higher than 120

I wish this LinkTap also worked on gravity fed water systems, even if they have decent pressure. It seems to require a pressurized system.

I have 4 55 gallon rain barrels connected together which feeds a garden drip system going to about 50 plants. I have pretty good pressure as I can have the system watering all plants and still have a lot of pressure left over for a garden hose, which fills a 2 gallon bucket in about 30 seconds with a full 3/4" stream of water jetting out (better than the water spigot on my house!). Once the LinkTap was installed, barely any water came out at all. Drips came out when the valve was open, not even a trickle. LinkTap doesn’t mention that anywhere that I could find, so thought I’d post here. Seems excellent besides that (critical for me) fact. So, it’s back to manually turning a valve every other day or every day when it’s hot. Ho hum.

Interesting.
I wonder if one of the older G1 devices would work better in your case, as they dont have any flow detection or anything like that.

I have a G1 on a water tank at my in laws and it seems to work. although its a drop of about 20m between where the tap is and the end of the irrigation run, and is a 10,000L tank,

The pressure coming out of your barrels seems to be higher than my mains pressure at times!

Their support team is pretty good, have you tried contacting them?

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I ended up getting a 5 gallon water pressure tank/pump and have it working now.

One thing puzzles me though. I have everything set to imperial measurements (gallons instead of liters) in the app, and the app displays those units, but HA reports water usage in liters for LinkTap_Volume. Does anyone know how to fix that (as well as LInkTap_Volume_Limit and LinkTap_Flow_Speed to display in US Gallons?

Are you using the HTTP custom integration I created, or MQTT ?

Honestly it’s been awhile since I installed it and don’t quite remember which method I used and I don’t see it anywhere in ha except the device is listed under MQTT in integrations, so I assume MQTT.

Check the MQTT discovery packet with mqtt explorer, and check if its sending the correct units.

But I just installed yours and it reports liters as well.

A suggestion: When it asks for the gateway’s IP, it should clear the text in the box when you click on it to enter the IP so you don’t have to manually do that.

Thats … interesting.
It queries the gateway for the volume units.

Ill DM you some commands to run to double check, but that looks like an issue with Linktap

Thank you so much for the help via DM’s, Dan! Got it all sorted and working. :star_struck:

For anyone following along, the mobile app units have nothing to do with MQTT or the local HTTP API. This needs to be configured on the local gateway config page, accessed by http://<GATEWAY_IP>

Step 1:Submit the unit change
Step 2: restart the gateway, and restart home assistant
Step 3: Profit.

Hi @sh00t2kill - thanks for the work you are doing here. Much appreciated.

I have just received my linktap gateway and timer. All working via mqtt and HA (using the HA broker type).

Now I see that you are working on this http api and I wanted to switch to the api. Can you explain how to do this? Do I need to disable mqtt?

I have installed the integration via HACS - but I don’t think it is working - see below from the error log.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/config_entries.py", line 387, in async_setup
    result = await component.async_setup_entry(hass, self)
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/config/custom_components/linktap/__init__.py", line 44, in async_setup_entry
    gw_id = await linker.get_gw_id()
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/config/custom_components/linktap/linktap_local.py", line 141, in get_gw_id
    status = await self._request(data)
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/config/custom_components/linktap/linktap_local.py", line 62, in _request
    jsonresp = json.loads(self.clean_response(response))
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/json/__init__.py", line 346, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/json/decoder.py", line 337, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/json/decoder.py", line 355, in raw_decode
    raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

All you should have to do is enable the local HTTP API.

Its also worth noting that it defaults to L for volume, if you are in the US change the units to gallons.

You dont need to disable MQTT, although it doesnt make sense to use both at once.

Thank you. This looks great and working now. I was stupid and entered the incorrect IP address for the gateway in the gateway settings. I removed the IP address and rebooted the gateway then added the integration in HA and all working.

From first impressions I think the api is more responsive than mqtt.

Thanks again

One more question @sh00t2kill

I would like to hold long term statistics for watering (hrs and volume) for my taps. It is easy to use the history_stats integration to do this for on/off time per day. I want the same but for water volume per day.

I think this will need to calculate volume based on flow rate and time per day and then somehow record this as a LTS

Do you have any idea how I can achieve this?

Probably a template sensor and history_stats, but off the top of my head im not sure.

you may even be able to use a utility_meter for the per day piece

Thanks. I didn’t know about the utility_meter integration. I will look into this and report back if I get it working.