Golf Course Water Conservation Project

Post here about your Arduino projects, get help - for Adafruit customers!

Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.
Locked
User avatar
jfcmoore
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Sep 06, 2018 9:51 am

Golf Course Water Conservation Project

Post by jfcmoore »

Newbie here - my apologies up front.

As an agronomist for the United States Golf Association for 33 years my focus over the last few years of my career was water conservation. This continues to be a passion of mine even into retirement. My current project is to utilize an experimental method of tee construction that I'm convinced will very significantly reduce water consumption in this area of the golf course. Without exaggeration, there is the potential to save hundreds of thousands of gallons per year. I am not looking to patent anything or sell a product. In fact, the construction method I will be using was first developed by a scientist at Purdue back in the 50's. All I'm doing is applying some modern construction materials and my knowledge of how water moves through a rootzone to hopefully extend the application to tees. If you are interested in the method developed at Purdue (by Dr. Bill Daniel) here is a link - http://archive.lib.msu.edu/tic/golfd/ar ... 7jul25.pdf. Dr. Daniel tried to make the concept work for greens but it never caught on - largely due to the impact of undulations in putting greens. Tees on the other hand, are flat and should be better suited to method.

I'm definite not asking any of you to do the work for me. In fact, I'm looking forward to figuring this out. My kids gave me the Arduino Starter Kit for my birthday and it appears to be the perfect tool for my project. Don't laugh but the last code writing I did was using BASIC about 30 years ago. I have been working my way through the Arduino tutorials and YouTube videos (thank you Paul McWhorter) and am looking forward to the software side of this project.

All I'm asking at this point is for a little help regarding the hardware I will need so that I can begin working on a mock-up of the project and begin writing the code. If I can get it to work in my shop, I will be constructing the actual tee at a local public golf course with funding provided by the USGA.

In order to scientifically validate the construction method I will need to control and measure water that is applied via a sub-surface pipe. My plan is to use an DFROBOT Gravity: Analog Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor to determine rootzone moisture. The sensor will control a solenoid actuated valve to apply the water. I also need to measure the amount of water applied.

Measurements will be:
1) Time and date the valve is opened
2) Time and date the valve is closed
3) Total amount of water applied over any given time period

All these values need to be written to an SD card so that I can import them into Excel.

Once I bring these into Excel I can easily manipulate the numbers for other calculations.

From the hardware side of things, I will be tying into the golf course irrigation system with a 1/2" line with an operating pressure typically ranging from about 70 to 130 psi. I do not have a source of power so a 12 volt battery and solar trickle charger will be used to power the Arduino and the valve via a relay.

Here is the hardware I have acquired so far (and this is where I could really use some help):
1) DFROBOT Gravity: Analog Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor- Corrosion Resistant
2) JBtek 4 Channel DC 5V Relay Module for Arduino Raspberry Pi DSP AVR PIC ARM
3) Adafruit Assembled Data Logging Shield for Arduino
4) DIGITEN G1/2" Water Flow Hall Sensor Switch Flow Meter Flowmeter Counter 1-30L/min
5) HFS 110v Ac or 12v Dc Electric Solenoid Valve Water Air Gas, Fuels N/c - 1/4", 1/2", 3/4", 1" NPT Available (12V DC 1/2" NPT)
6) After watching Tinker and Build (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioSYlxH ... QRsxg&t=0s) it looks like I will also need a snubber or flyback diode to prevent arcing from the action of the solenoid but I don't know what type of diode to get.
7) I already have the battery as well.

So, what I am asking you folks is if you see anything obvious that I'm missing before I start building the circuit and writing the code?

I know water management is a common Arduino topic so I will keep digging through the forum and YouTube.

Thanks to you all!
jfcmoore

User avatar
Franklin97355
 
Posts: 23911
Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2008 2:33 pm

Re: Golf Course Water Conservation Project

Post by Franklin97355 »

You still need the processor board ( Arduino or Metro since you are using a shield ) and some form of power switching since the Arduino will probably not be able to power the solenoids from a data pin. How much flow and what size pipe are you planning to connect to? You might look at battery powered sprinkler valves for this project.

User avatar
oesterle
 
Posts: 806
Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2013 11:32 pm

Re: Golf Course Water Conservation Project

Post by oesterle »

Hi, jfcmoore!

This sounds like a great project!

The solenoid valve you included doesn't look like it latches closed or open, but seems rather to require power continuously. I haven't yet worked on an irrigation project, but something like a motorized ball valve seems like it would require less power, since it only uses significant power only when changing between open and closed states.

Here's one on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Motorized-Valve- ... 2PPGZ?th=1

There's some related discussion on Arduino's forums of an Arduino + solenoid valve project, which discusses the flyback diode, and how some relays already include one.

I'd also consider looking at the Feather ecosystem, which is Arduino compatible, more compact, and includes some peripherals like those you listed:

Adafruit Feather M0 Bluefruit LE
This board has a fast, low-power processor, with 32K of RAM. I'm thinking Bluetooth might be nice, so that you could show a plot of live status easily (using Bluefruit LE Connect for iOS), or a groundskeeper could walk by and collect data, without removing the SD card from the logger.

Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi with uFL - ATSAMD21 + ATWINC1500 - fw 19.4.4
Instead of Bluetooth, this board uses WiFi, so that the board can log data to the cloud. Adafruit has a great service for capturing and plotting your data: adafruit.io. You can show live data in any web browser, making for a compelling demo.

Adalogger FeatherWing - RTC + SD Add-on For All Feather Boards
This wing, like the Arduino shield you listed, logs to an SD card, and includes a battery backed-up real time clock.

Adafruit Latching Mini Relay FeatherWing
This is a latching relay wing; the schematic indicates there are diodes included.

I have the best luck building projects with lots of moving parts like this one, if I build a bunch of simple, sub-projects, each involving just one peripheral. In that vein, here are some pieces that you can build before combining everything, in the Adafruit Learning System:
Mini Relay FeatherWings
USB, DC & Solar Lipoly Charger
Wireless Gardening with Arduino + CC3000 WiFi Modules

Cheers,

Eric

User avatar
jfcmoore
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Sep 06, 2018 9:51 am

Re: Golf Course Water Conservation Project

Post by jfcmoore »

Thanks to you both for the replies.

I have the Arduino Uno which came with the starter kit my sons gave me. I have been using it to work my way through the tutorials.

The solenoid valve I ordered is not a latching valve and will require power to open it and allow water to flow. However, I anticipate the valve will not be opening very often and for a limited time when open. My guess is that it will open no more than once per week and will need to stay open for no more than 30 minutes each cycle. However, I do have access to some battery-operated sprinkler valves from another project and will check out using one of them. They are much larger valves (1 1/2") and might work better. Thanks for the suggestion.

Eric,

I appreciate the suggestion to work with the simple, sub-projects. That is exactly what I plan to do. I have found a lot of others that have completed parts of my project so I should be able to use their experience and piece things together as I progress - at least that is the plan.

I like the Bluetooth concept but since I am the only one who will be monitoring this and since it is only one tee I think I'm going to keep it simple for now.

Thanks again for the suggestions. I'll post to this thread as I progress.

Locked
Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.

Return to “Arduino”