So this is not really about the Raspberry Pi, but will be. The goal is to have the Pi powering all the home automation tools possible but in all honesty a Pi is not needed for the awesome that is EtherRain.
An EtherRain 8 lets you water your lawn without having to move away from your computer. The best part is the API allowing unlimited fun time with your sprinkler system. Just imagine a world in which your sprinkler comes on as a solicitor walks up to your front door (ok, maybe that is mean – we can pretend it is a burglar) or you want to have complex scheduling to allow you to skirt water restrictions. I now live in this world.
Currently you cannot order them directly from the website, but Jim from QuickSmart is great.
Setup took under 30 minutes. Nothing super technical at first – just follow the instructions and run the admin tool from the website. It detects the device and reports back the ip/current configuration. This step can be done from the API but honestly the admin tool was so ridiculously quick and easy.
I used PHP to schedule a quick test run of 1 minute per zone. Everything went as planned. Tomorrow morning is the real test – will update soon.
UPDATE – EtherRain is working great. Almost at the month mark.
Reviewed by Thomas Loughlin on July 11th.
It works! Customer service is great.
The whole process was easy. Filled out a contact form, Jim got back to me immediately and sent over all the information. Order was placed through Paypal and I received the order in only a couple days.
Rating:
Comments
Don’t know if you are reading comments to this but I have a raspberry pi/EtherRain 8 setup running OptiRain Open V1.6 and basically nothing works but QuickCycle. I am wondering what version of OptiRain Open are you running, or are you running something entirely different?
I have v1.16. My guess is that you might have a permissioning problem. If I remember correctly the code writes a file for inclusion in crontab. A quick grep of the code shows the writing occurring in or_main.php.
Or if you don’t want to go digging, add this to crontab:
*/5 * * * * wget -O – -q -t 1 http://localhost/sprink/optirain/or_scheduler.php
But with the appropriate path.
You are right on the version, mine is also 1.16. It is a mystery, the cron file is fine and apache’s logs show the scheduler running every 5 minutes. After several failures, I just got it to run There are lots of undefined variables and undefined offsets being logged by PHP in apache’s error log.
I think that it’s very interesting. I would like to know if you have the documentation about the EtherRain API because I would like to know more details about it for a personal project. When you bought the EtherRain device, did you get the api documentation to develop this test? Thanks
I requested and received all of the api information from Jim at Quicksmart. He was a super nice guy and I am sure would help you with your project.