New OB RPi Set Up

[setsailsoon]

Folks,

Some of you may be familiar with my OB pool project that sort of started over two years ago with the house OB. Delayed it over a year due to covid then started the house and finished in Sep 2022. Then life happened with a number of health issues for my wife. Finally made some progress on that front and I started the pool in Feb. Lost a month of construction due to health matters during the build and now have had water in the pool with both pumps running on manual. So now I'm hooking everything up and starting to implement the RPi solution that I've read about for years with envy and hope that I could figure out enough myself and get a lot of help from experts here to make it work. The purpose of this separate thread is to describe how I'm doing this and give people roadmap that anybody can follow to do this themselves. I thought about adding this to the build thread but that's mostly about a design, construction, and startup project (here's a like if you want info on the pool project). I'd like to make sure this is the place where searches for the automation aspects land and people don't have to read through the 1000 plus entries to get the automation "meat". I've gotten a huge amount of help already from @Katodude, @MyAZPool, @rstrouse, @newdude, @ajw22 @James @mas985 and others on automation and I'm hoping to attract suggestions, help, and even a little entertainment from others. I'm already benefitting a lot from the work several of you have done to document how to do this here and at github. Next post from me will describe automation plan, status and next steps, what has me stumped right now plus include a few photos.

Chris

 

[setsailsoon]

Folks,

OK so here goes. My set up consists of a 3 board stack of:

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B - 4 GB RAM

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the newest Raspberry Pi computer made, and the Pi Foundation knows you can always make a good thing better! And what could make the Pi 4 better than the 3? How ...

www.adafruit.com

Building Automation Eight-Layer Stackable HAT for Raspberry Pi ZERO-5

Building Automation HAT has all IO's needed for Building Automation Systems; 8 universal inputs; 4xtriac outputs; 4x0-10V outputs; RTS, 1-Wire, RS485, Watchdog, 24V.

sequentmicrosystems.com

Relays Eight of 4A/120V 8-Layer Stackable HAT for Raspberry Pi

8 Relays 4A/120V 8-layer stackable HAT for Raspberry Pi Status LEDs and NO/NC contacts Eight layer stackable to 64 relays Pluggable Connectors 26-16 AW

sequentmicrosystems.com

Please note there are lots of places to buy the RPi, just search and you can find the best price/delivery for you. The board has to have a program (or actually several) copied to a sim card to get started. @Katodude was close enough to my house and kind enough to do this for me. Here's the procedure to follow though:

nodejs poolController dashPanel setup and configuration on a Raspberry Pi for the novice

A dashboard panel for tagyoureit/nodejs-poolController - rstrouse/nodejs-poolController-dashPanel

github.com

This is a phenomenal step-by-step procedure for installing the software on the card and was written by @MyAZPool .

Now you are ready to configure your board and software for your actual installation. Fortunately there's another guide for this:

Once you get here you can enter an address into the search bar for a web browser and get to two very important sites. One is the Remote Equipment Manager (REM) that looks like this for my pool at the moment:

The second address gets you to here:

This is what you'll see on your phone, pad or desktop that you can use to control your pool. It's called the Pool Control Dashboard.

Next you'll need to set up your specific equipment, sensors, and valve actions etc. To do this there's another incredible guide:

DIY Standalone Nixie Pool Controller

An application to control pool equipment from various manufacturers. - tagyoureit/nodejs-poolController

github.com

This guide is like RPi for Dummies (like me) to go through the sort of complex and geeky setup and actually even gets into the details about how to wire the whole thing up without knowing the first thing about Python programming.

 

[setsailsoon]

Right now my biggest challenge is to get a temp sensor working. The process is very complex for a newbie like me and I'm sure I have something set up incorrectly. I have checked and I have the inputs selected properly on the Building Automation Board. But for some reason I'm not seeing the temp or resistance values that I should be here in the REM:

As you can see it just reports .007K ohms. It should indicate about 11.7 K ohms. In fact it has this reading whether the thermister is plugged in or not which I take to mean maybe the feed is incorrect. Here's what I show there:


Can one of you experts please help?

Thanks.

Chris

 

[setsailsoon]

OK, stumped again. Can't even get the RS485 to work. Here's a snip of my pool control dashboard:




When I hover over the red triangle I get the "Primary RS485 port disconnected" message. Sounds like that's my problem so how to fix it? I've checked and I have the dip switches on J3 set to "pass-thru" mode but I got the same message when they were open instead of closed. Seems like my problem is more basic than that. @Rattus Suffocatus @MyAZPool @rstrouse or anybody? Any ideas?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Chris

 

[setsailsoon]

Finally, some progress! I figured out pretty quickly was that I didn't have an RS 485 port connected. Problem was how do I do that? I had the switches properly configured on the Building Automation Board. I also had the RS485 connector wired to the RS 485 connector on the pump. But still I had the "no port connected" error. Went through all the steps several times and everything was connected correctly. But what really puzzled me was I didn't have any place to set the port parameters. I don't know much about these things but usually you have to set baud rate and a few other things like stop bits etc and a few other geeky settings that vaguely make sense to me. Finally I went through all the settings again on the Nixie Shared Body dashboard and found this buried deep in the settings bowels:



Only when I found it there were no ports set up. There are about 8 or 10 different setting parameters and after guessing a little bit I finally got the warning triangle to go away and voila! The pump rpm and watts started to show numbers. Plus I could even click and change the speed!

I finally figure one part of this out myself. But it was a brutal process and I'm hopeful an expert can help me get the temp probe working.

Chris

 

[Turbo1Ton]

I finally figure one part of this out myself. But it was a brutal process and I'm hopeful an expert can help me get the temp probe working.

Chris - you may be better off posting your questions like these direct to the github repository. Might get better response over there. Then could post up your journey over here.

--Jeff

 

[rstrouse]

To set up the temp probe create a generic temperature probe. The instructions on how to set this up can be found here. Sequent Microsystems Boards

 

[rstrouse]

Here is the link on how to set up a temperature probe.

Generic Devices

A hardware controller for GPIO, I2c, SPI, and generic devices. - rstrouse/relayEquipmentManager

github.com

 

[setsailsoon]

Thanks for the responses guys! Turbo you may be right and that may be the best path for me. But I have to tell you that navigating my way around Github isn't easy for me. I'm barely knowledgeable enough to be doing this and maybe even not. So I'm hoping programming and electronics whizzes that are on here can help bridge the gap for me. So far I've gotten huge help from several, only problem is I don't want to monopolize the time of a few so I'm hoping my story documented here will allow me to "spread the load" amongst several and provide a roadmap for the more ignorant people like me that venture into this space. And this might lighten their load even more. I hope it works and if not, I'll definitely take your advice and try Github first.

For now, I think I made a huge step forward yesterday by discovering a step to set up the RS 485 port that wasn't documented or at least not very clearly in anything I had read. In addition to following the instructions documented in this excellent article:

DIY Standalone Nixie Pool Controller

An application to control pool equipment from various manufacturers. - tagyoureit/nodejs-poolController

github.com

You have to create a port in the REM here:


By going into the settings (double gear top right), it comes up like this:



From here you have to click on the "controller" tab to get this:



And you're not quite done at this point, you have to click on "Comms" from the sub-tabs to get this:



If the list is empty you don't have a port set up yet in the software. No matter how many times and how correctly you do everything else it won't work. So you click the "Add RS485 Port" button. Then you have to configure it with drop down menus to look exactly like this:



Oh, and one last thing. You have to save this port using the "Save Port" button and in my case I had to reload the page.

Once I did this everything worked. I can't tell you how much I appreciate the fabulous articles on Github how great they are... but the problem with them for me is they get me 99% of where I need to be. But that 1% remaining might as well be 99%. It won't work without the last step and I suspect that 1% is common knowledge for Githubbers or they can easily figure it out. I'm hoping this thread may bridge that gap for many others like me.

Thanks again for your help.

Chris

 

[Turbo1Ton]

Thanks for the responses guys! Turbo you may be right and that may be the best path for me. But I have to tell you that navigating my way around Github isn't easy for me. I'm barely knowledgeable enough to be doing this and maybe even not. So I'm hoping programming and electronics whizzes that are on here can help bridge the gap for me. So far I've gotten huge help from several, only problem is I don't want to monopolize the time of a few so I'm hoping my story documented here will allow me to "spread the load" amongst several and provide a roadmap for the more ignorant people like me that venture into this space. And this might lighten their load even more. I hope it works and if not, I'll definitely take your advice and try Github first.

For now, I think I made a huge step forward yesterday by discovering a step to set up the RS 485 port that wasn't documented or at least not very clearly in anything I had read. In addition to following the instructions documented in this excellent article:

DIY Standalone Nixie Pool Controller

An application to control pool equipment from various manufacturers. - tagyoureit/nodejs-poolController

github.com

You have to create a port in the REM here:
View attachment 585106

By going into the settings (double gear top right), it comes up like this:

View attachment 585107

From here you have to click on the "controller" tab to get this:

View attachment 585108

And you're not quite done at this point, you have to click on "Comms" from the sub-tabs to get this:

View attachment 585109

If the list is empty you don't have a port set up yet in the software. No matter how many times and how correctly you do everything else it won't work. So you click the "Add RS485 Port" button. Then you have to configure it with drop down menus to look exactly like this:

View attachment 585112

Oh, and one last thing. You have to save this port using the "Save Port" button and in my case I had to reload the page.

Once I did this everything worked. I can't tell you how much I appreciate the fabulous articles on Github how great they are... but the problem with them for me is they get me 99% of where I need to be. But that 1% remaining might as well be 99%. It won't work without the last step and I suspect that 1% is common knowledge for Githubbers or they can easily figure it out. I'm hoping this thread may bridge that gap for many others like me.

Thanks again for your help.

Chris

I'm one of the ignorant ones when it comes to this stuff. I was able to follow along the instructions myAZPool listed out in his thread, but much more than that and I got lost. Github is pretty easy to figure out if you need to go that way.

My problem is I just have too little time at the moment to spend dorking with it. If I could spend time playing with the stuff, kinda like you are doing, I would figure things out. I am a better hands on learner as I remember my mistakes much better than my successes! I had the Intellicenter setup first so I am not running the REM program.

I'm confident that you will get this figured out, and appreciate you posting your struggles and journey for all the less than computer whiz folks like me out there, who have the capability for doing this stuff, just maybe not the knowledge (yet).

--Jeff

 

[setsailsoon]

Made a lot of progress with the help of @Katodude today. He actually talked me through a lot of it. Got temp readouts on the REM inputs connection on the I2C bus. For the first time since I've been doing this the REM is displaying the correct value on input #2 of 9.57 Kohms which is about 78 deg. But still have this persistent problem with getting this information to the devices. Andy was kind enough to send in a ticked to Github so hopefully I'll be done with this soon. In the meantime I've got plumbing and other pump work on.

Chris

 

[Katodude]

We can also mess around with some valve actuators if you want to. Thats pretty easy to do.

 

[rstrouse]

I responded to your issue in the repo. You need to make an adjustment to the feed from the MEGA-BAS.

 

[Katodude]

Yep, saw that. It worked.

@setsailsoon You should set up feeds to the other temps, and then delete them. Let’s start troubleshooting by only having one temp feed. Then we can start adding.

 

[setsailsoon]

We can also mess around with some valve actuators if you want to. Thats pretty easy to do.

Yep, saw that. It worked.

@setsailsoon You should set up feeds to the other temps, and then delete them. Let’s start troubleshooting by only having one temp feed. Then we can start adding.

OK, let me try that.

 

[setsailsoon]

Yep, saw that. It worked.

@setsailsoon You should set up feeds to the other temps, and then delete them. Let’s start troubleshooting by only having one temp feed. Then we can start adding.

I can't see where the repo is can you please send me a copy or point me to it? I went into REM and still have this:


No place to click so I can add a feed?

Chris

 

[rstrouse]

This is a feed on the Mega BAS that feeds the generic value. Select the I2c #1 tab at the top then select your Mega BAS card from the device list. You will find the Feeds listed on the device.

 

[setsailsoon]

This is a feed on the Mega BAS that feeds the generic value. Select the I2c #1 tab at the top then select your Mega BAS card from the device list. You will find the Feeds listed on the device.

Yes, that's what I've been doing. Deleted the feeds, saved, then added them back and I still can't get rid of these:


Something seems corrupted and could very well be from my doing something wrong during configuration. Here's what I get when I try to delete them:

As you can see no delete button. Even after several times of adding and deleting feeds in the I2C tab:

Andy and I went through this several times and I believe his last thought were to re-download and install the REM. Do you have anything else to try?

Chris

PS By the way, I can't tell you how much I appreciate the help from you guys!

 

[rstrouse]

I responded to the issue in the repo. You should pull the updates from the repo as I believe that it is still trying to digest the invalid value. I added some checks to read sensor value out of the pin data.

 

[Katodude]

We tried doing a git pull and got a bunch of errors.

I think we are just going to blow away the REM directory and do a brand new install.