A story about a pool

[kimkats]

Well told! I love a happy ending! That tree had to go! Did you take it down on your own? I would scared to death about it hitting the house!

 

[sidewaysboost]

Then one day a sickness came over the land and the owner was forced to work from home. So with all the extra time available, the owner finally got off his butt and started building the automation he had always wanted to build. View attachment 482793
View attachment 482794
Version 1 was build and installed along with new wiring and mostly worked,View attachment 482796

But sensors were added, new pumps were required and improvements were needed in general so version 1.5 was built.
View attachment 482795
Version 1.5 worked well and for the last two years the pool has stayed blue all year long. But the man got bored and the wires got snarled, View attachment 482797
So over the last month a new version 2 was designed, and today the boards came. And immediately there was much rejoicing and soldering.
View attachment 482798
View attachment 482799
A new controller board,
View attachment 482800
a new display board,
View attachment 482801
and a new relay interface boardView attachment 482802
And Sunday it will be installed and life will be good?

Hope the install went well because this is brilliantly well done! Especially the custom PCBs, very clean and professional looking.

Care to share any details on how you have the Raspberry Pi controlling everything? Did you base it off of another automation system or is it completely custom by you?

 

[AUSpool]

Any Ideas on what to do with my old pool sweep? I've already repurposed the return line for it as the pipe I put my eTape liquid level sensor in. So all it's doing is sitting and taking up space.

I'm also thinking about putting in a slight restriction in the line from the pump to the tank to encourage more flow through the sensor loop.

Very nice pool recovery. Trees and pools are never a good mix, that concrete repair was next level.

A slight restriction would help increase flow in the sensor loop. Increasing the plumbing size in the sensor loop would help too but I would probably just put the sensors in the main line without the loop.

Im not sure about acid injection in front of the pump, I thought that was meant to be injected in after all other equipment.

 

[thrystan]

Well told! I love a happy ending! That tree had to go! Did you take it down on your own? I would scared to death about it hitting the house!

I had a friend help me do it.

 

[thrystan]

Very nice pool recovery. Trees and pools are never a good mix, that concrete repair was next level.

A slight restriction would help increase flow in the sensor loop. Increasing the plumbing size in the sensor loop would help too but I would probably just put the sensors in the main line without the loop.

Im not sure about acid injection in front of the pump, I thought that was meant to be injected in after all other equipment.

The sensors have to be in a loop to make sure they don't ever dry out.

The acid is diluted 4:1 and it takes 7 seconds to add 1 ounce of the diluted acid.

 

[generessler]

As an old EE I absolutely salute the automation effort! Beautiful and fascinating.

One thing to pay attention to is temp ratings vs. temps that will exist inside the component boxes on the 100F+ days I see in historical weather for your location. Definitely keep the electronics protected from the sun. Chinese clone components probably won't hack it.

I suppose you know that.

This is one thing the exorbitantly priced Pentaire, Jandy, etc. systems do get right.

I'm very much interested pointers to the dosing pumps you're using and reports on how they perform. Thanks.

 

[thrystan]

Hope the install went well because this is brilliantly well done! Especially the custom PCBs, very clean and professional looking.

Care to share any details on how you have the Raspberry Pi controlling everything? Did you base it off of another automation system or is it completely custom by you?

I'm a programmer by trade so I wrote everything custom. I have a routine that watches the flow meter and sets a GPIO pin when the flow meter is on. Then I have two programs that add Chlorine and Acid. They turn off the flow pin, and then check to see if it has been turned back on. If so then they pump an ounce of the appropriate chemical. In addition to that I have a hardware interlock consisting of a 3 input and gate where the inputs are the pump pin, the chlorine pin and the inverted acid pin, or visa versa for acid. So there is no way that Chlorine and Acid can pump at the same time, and also there is no way that either chemical can be added to the line while the pump is off.

I have cron jobs running every hour, when the pump is scheduled to be running, (I run the pump from midnight to 3 pm and from 9pm til midnight) I adjust the cron jobs so that the appropriate amount of Chlorine is added but usually it is 1 or 2 ounces per hour. I am triggering the acid addition program manually at the moment, and probably will for the near future, since I only use 1 or 2 gallons of acid per year.

I also have programs that monitor the other sensors and write their values to a database. Also when the chemicals are added they log each ounce that is added to the database.

I then read the database into Home Assistant to monitor the data.

Part of version 2 is upgrading to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, which will let me install the update for Node-js and hopefully get my RS-485 connection working with the pump. If I get that working then I'll play with the Node-js stuff. I'm adding a relay to be able to turn on the pool light, and I have other relays that will control landscape lighting when I get around to adding that.

So yeah, it's all custom, I just counted the cost for the current setup and it's about $750 in parts. Of course there are probably another $200-$400 in parts that I bought trying to get things to work. For instance I tried several cheap peristaltic pumps before I found one that the pool pump didn't suck liquid through. Though I still spent less than a stenner even including all the ones that didn't work.

The PCBs are interesting because they cost $5 plus shipping for each design for either 5 or 10 pieces. So I have lots of extras. After shipping they come out to about $1 per board.

 

[thrystan]

As an old EE I absolutely salute the automation effort! Beautiful and fascinating.

One thing to pay attention to is temp ratings vs. temps that will exist inside the component boxes on the 100F+ days I see in historical weather for your location. Definitely keep the electronics protected from the sun. Chinese clone components probably won't hack it.

I suppose you know that.

This is one thing the exorbitantly priced Pentaire, Jandy, etc. systems do get right.

I'm very much interested pointers to the dosing pumps you're using and reports on how they perform. Thanks.

I've had it running in various configurations for the last 2 summers without any issues, so I'm not too worried about the high temps. My neighbor has an oak tree, you can see the leaves in the last pic, that overhangs the equipment pad so that helps some. The other thing is that there aren't actually a lot of components, I've got the ras pi zero, an ethernet hat for it, 4 chips, a couple of resistors and diodes, and 2 TIP120 power transistors to control the pumps. The rest is just connections to the sensors.

The pumps I'm using are these. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07J2JDT54 I did have to replace one, because I didn't have the right tubing for acid and fumes killed it. That was also when I moved the two pumps to their own sealed boxes and out of the controller box. Now that I have the right tubing it shouldn't have any more issues. The chlorine pump hasn't had any issues. The one thing to make sure of is that these pumps use 10mm x 7mm tubing, if you try to use 10mm x 8mm tubing, the rollers don't pinch hard enough and the pool pump will suck the chemical straight through the chemical pump.

 

[Snoobug]

I love this story!

 

[JodieM]

Clean up your Polaris and sell it. I bought mine second hand on this site.

 

[generessler]

II did have to replace one, because I didn't have the right tubing for acid and fumes killed it. That was also when I moved the two pumps to their own sealed boxes and out of the controller box. Now that I have the right tubing it shouldn't have any more issues. The chlorine pump hasn't had any issues. The one thing to make sure of is that these pumps use 10mm x 7mm tubing, if you try to use 10mm x 8mm tubing, the rollers don't pinch hard enough and the pool pump will suck the chemical straight through the chemical pump.

Thanks! Perfect advice.

So what is the magic tubing material? The classical Stenner pump has some advice here. There's a row for muriatic acid. Santoprene seems preferred, but 10mm x 7mm seems hard to find. There's lots of 7/16" x 5/16". Maybe metric manufacturers use a different name for this material?

 

[thrystan]

Thanks! Perfect advice.

So what is the magic tubing material? The classical Stenner pump has some advice here. There's a row for muriatic acid. Santoprene seems preferred, but 10mm x 7mm seems hard to find. There's lots of 7/16" x 5/16". Maybe metric manufacturers use a different name for this material?

I'm using tygon r-3603 for the acid. I got it from McMaster.

 

[thrystan]

Here is the Atlas Scientific EZO boards and carrier board I "designed". Does it count as a design when it is basically just a bus? This box also routes the water temp and water level sensor cables.



The version 1.5 board, this is after I disconnected all the wires,
has made way for the version 2.0 board.


The yellow and red buttons allow the chlorine and acid pumps to be run manually. Mostly this is for priming the line if needed, or for verifying that everything is still working.

Version 2.0 also has a "larger" screen, it's still tiny, and there are the 3 leds, blue is for when the pool pump is running, yellow is the chlorine pump running, and red is the acid pump running.
I still have a couple of things to tweak, but the important stuff is working. Of course I have also tweaked the circuit board design with a few things I discovered I should have done differently. I'm also working on hooking up a relay to switch the pool light, it will be in parallel with the real switch.

Currently I am working on getting the nodejs pool controller software working. Once I do this would be a really good base to run it off of. It has most of the things that the relay equipment manager is currently setup to support, and the nodejs pool controller software is much more complete that what I have done. If someone is interested in trying this out, I can sell my extra boards, either bare with instructions for what to put where, or populated. It's designed to work with the raspberry pi zero 2, which can be wifi though I use a ethernet hat because I like wired connections better than wifi, a 3 or a 4 would work also, though they would take some finagling to get to fit. If there is any interest, I can get more boards made. This is definitely for the pool owner that wants to play with DIY stuff, but the design has been working well for me since the summer of 2020. And it kept my pool clear while we were gone for 2-3 months last summer.

I'll post a couple more pictures once I've got the wires tidied up and cleaned the equipment pad up.

 

[Mdragger88]

Very nice I can’t stress enough that you should at least put a walmart sack or something over your $300 dolphin power supply until you can come up with something more permanent. It never rains in California until it does…

 

[RASelkirk]

LOL, that 1st pic looks like my son's (vinyl) 40k pool. He'll spend a fortune bringing it around in the spring, uses it for a couple weeks, then lets it slide 'til next year...

Russ

 

[jesse-99]

I'm a programmer by trade so I wrote everything custom. I have a routine that watches the flow meter and sets a GPIO pin when the flow meter is on. Then I have two programs that add Chlorine and Acid. They turn off the flow pin, and then check to see if it has been turned back on. If so then they pump an ounce of the appropriate chemical. In addition to that I have a hardware interlock consisting of a 3 input and gate where the inputs are the pump pin, the chlorine pin and the inverted acid pin, or visa versa for acid. So there is no way that Chlorine and Acid can pump at the same time, and also there is no way that either chemical can be added to the line while the pump is off.

*snipped the rest*

I like this story, but am I most impressed with you programming your own automation system, that's crazy! I bet others would love to hear more about it too. Truly outstanding work!!

 

[thrystan]

Added a roof, on hinges, to protect all the stuff, but still have access to work on things.