After using your signature to help me find other posts that took on similar projects, I think I am going to give this a try. I am a totally noob to this, but it seems doable. Hopefully you and others won't mind helping me as I work through the knowledge building process.
This is what I have in mind:
Schedule and control Pentair VSP
Turn on and off my lights
ICHLOR 30- adjust SWG run %
Solar Controller Pentair Solar touch (not installed yet)
Less important, but if I could turn on my waterfall which would be one valve without having to walk through my rock that would be a big positive
So my first question as I map out what components I will need is if my loadcenter which is practically brand new, (pool built in 2020), can I focus on building rasberryPI and pulling power from my existing load center to run it? I am thinking I need to lay out how this will look before I start thinking of anything else.
Happy to help! I'd never done a project like this and was also a total noob. I do have a computer/tech/nerd background but it's certainly not necessary if you're DIY minded. The one caveat I see is the Solartouch system is standalone. I see problems if you try to control the pump from both the solar touch AND nodejs-poolcontroller. You'll probably have to choose one or the other there.
@Katodude and
@MyAZPool both have an existing load center setup. They built a separate low voltage box and then just run the high voltage stuff to a relay in the low voltage box. So I guess it's not technically a low voltage box anymore but the high voltage intrusion is minimal. Just into a relay and back out to the main load center where it goes off to the equipment. The pictures of their setups are
here and
here. It's a good way to do it, I just made a whole new setup because my existing sub-panel was old and busted.
You're basically looking at a box, an rPi, a RS-485 adapter for your rPi, a relay hat for your rPi, 5V DC PS for rPi power and some terminal blocks to hook it all up.
Depending on what you have and what you want to do, optionally the following as well:
Valve Actuators and a 24V AC power supply for any valve automation you want to do (Solar/Waterfall)
Depending on what type of lights you have (low voltage/high voltage), potentially some high voltage relays to turn them on and off. If they're low voltage you can just switch them from the rPi relay hat
ADC hat and temp sensors to read pool temperature for your solar system if you choose to integrate it
You'll notice a few of us use the DIN rail equipment but that's not required. Just makes life easier (IMO).
