Yes, thank you. I appreciate your feedback. What you see here is the tip of the iceberg. Reading back to my original article. This is all hooked up to a Raspberry pi/ Linux box that is running some intelligence. We've been tracking our soil temperature rainfall air temperature for quite a while now. There's another reason I've designed it this way and the most likely the most important.. when you buy into the hunter/ rain bird ecosystem you are stuck with them. And you are stuck with what they decide the software should look like. And if they are cloud managed, you are stuck with cloud management systems. If there's a denial of service attack on their cloud, you're out of luck. You out of luck. I've seen the exact same thing happen with dab pumps. I love their hardware about whoever wrote their software. Did it prevent you from stepping out of their ecosystem?.. so yeah I appreciate what you're telling me. It's just part of a bigger picture that's all
May I only add this: I'm a professional Landscape Architect; it's my business to design and specify complex irrigation systems. There are many features nowadays on clocks, valves and other appurtenances like custom-regulation when there's been rainfall on controllers offered by Hunter, RainBird, Toro, et.al., that provide much more functionality as well as use of a single wire system (this one is huge). They are a breeze! And, I imagine, much less expensive.
OTOH, not nearly as much fun as this project…lol.
ps: There's also lots of design help/advice t your local irrigation distributor.
Long ago (1967) there was Burroughs Two Wire Direct Interface (TDI) that could move data about 1,000 feet (300 meters) at 9600bps. Along with the Burroughs Poll Select (BPS) protocol you could run about a dozen terminals on a run of cable. They stayed in the game until at least the early 2000s. I started with it in the mid-eighties and the terminals that ran it were Intel 8080 based with a few kilobytes of memory. Roll forward and the hardware is much better to solve the same problem of talking to multiple nodes spread out all over the place. Cool.
Al, I probably forgotten more about building two wire interfaces then I know. There's so many ways to do this but my goal here was to shut the power off on those receivers in between valve switching. So in the best of all worlds 428 is the easiest and cheapest system. Shit. I suppose I could run arcnet LOL
"Welcome to the ARC!". I encountered Datapoint and ARCNet at the same time as TDI at my first job in IT as the third shift "mainframe" operator at St. Anthony's Hospital back in 1983/84. Watching these projects, it would not surprise me to see you build out a token passing protocol to solve some problem! :)
All kidding aside its good to see you getting some enjoyment out of tech again. Working in the corporate world sucks the soul out of you. Working with the modern batch of coders is a painful exercise as they try to debug their code with A.I. and little to no understanding of the framework they are using. Stepping through code with a debugger does not seem to be thing any more.
One of these days I need to find an excuse to get up to that part of Arkansas. My bishop has a parish up there somewhere.
You know I wrote drivers for the Macintosh cirxa OS 8/9 for arcnet, token ring, ethernet, and a few other weird ones... Including dec stuff.. but wow datapoint was something else .. pretty amazing for its time. I recently read a book about it too. I remember playing with them but didn't know a lot about what was behind it.
A lot of history there. I remember you talking about some of your early work at Apple at other times/places. The story of the Intel 8008 processor and subsequent history starts with Datapoint and they were pretty cool machines.
Yes, thank you. I appreciate your feedback. What you see here is the tip of the iceberg. Reading back to my original article. This is all hooked up to a Raspberry pi/ Linux box that is running some intelligence. We've been tracking our soil temperature rainfall air temperature for quite a while now. There's another reason I've designed it this way and the most likely the most important.. when you buy into the hunter/ rain bird ecosystem you are stuck with them. And you are stuck with what they decide the software should look like. And if they are cloud managed, you are stuck with cloud management systems. If there's a denial of service attack on their cloud, you're out of luck. You out of luck. I've seen the exact same thing happen with dab pumps. I love their hardware about whoever wrote their software. Did it prevent you from stepping out of their ecosystem?.. so yeah I appreciate what you're telling me. It's just part of a bigger picture that's all
Hey Vinnie…You're my kind of guy!
Sounds like a fun, geeky project!
May I only add this: I'm a professional Landscape Architect; it's my business to design and specify complex irrigation systems. There are many features nowadays on clocks, valves and other appurtenances like custom-regulation when there's been rainfall on controllers offered by Hunter, RainBird, Toro, et.al., that provide much more functionality as well as use of a single wire system (this one is huge). They are a breeze! And, I imagine, much less expensive.
OTOH, not nearly as much fun as this project…lol.
ps: There's also lots of design help/advice t your local irrigation distributor.
Long ago (1967) there was Burroughs Two Wire Direct Interface (TDI) that could move data about 1,000 feet (300 meters) at 9600bps. Along with the Burroughs Poll Select (BPS) protocol you could run about a dozen terminals on a run of cable. They stayed in the game until at least the early 2000s. I started with it in the mid-eighties and the terminals that ran it were Intel 8080 based with a few kilobytes of memory. Roll forward and the hardware is much better to solve the same problem of talking to multiple nodes spread out all over the place. Cool.
Al, I probably forgotten more about building two wire interfaces then I know. There's so many ways to do this but my goal here was to shut the power off on those receivers in between valve switching. So in the best of all worlds 428 is the easiest and cheapest system. Shit. I suppose I could run arcnet LOL
"Welcome to the ARC!". I encountered Datapoint and ARCNet at the same time as TDI at my first job in IT as the third shift "mainframe" operator at St. Anthony's Hospital back in 1983/84. Watching these projects, it would not surprise me to see you build out a token passing protocol to solve some problem! :)
All kidding aside its good to see you getting some enjoyment out of tech again. Working in the corporate world sucks the soul out of you. Working with the modern batch of coders is a painful exercise as they try to debug their code with A.I. and little to no understanding of the framework they are using. Stepping through code with a debugger does not seem to be thing any more.
One of these days I need to find an excuse to get up to that part of Arkansas. My bishop has a parish up there somewhere.
You know I wrote drivers for the Macintosh cirxa OS 8/9 for arcnet, token ring, ethernet, and a few other weird ones... Including dec stuff.. but wow datapoint was something else .. pretty amazing for its time. I recently read a book about it too. I remember playing with them but didn't know a lot about what was behind it.
.
A lot of history there. I remember you talking about some of your early work at Apple at other times/places. The story of the Intel 8008 processor and subsequent history starts with Datapoint and they were pretty cool machines.