I’ve been running an 8 channel relay on an ESP32 board for quite a while now to control my irrigation system, I have it connected in parallel with the existing Orbit system which just stays switched off.
It’s worked ok but I had a ton of automations and helpers so it was quite cumbersome and if I wanted to bypass a zone or change the run duration of a particular sprinkler it wasn’t that straight forward. I know there are some blueprints etc… for sprinkler control but they seemed quite complex to configure and still required a lot of automations.
Anyway, I stumbled across ESPHome Sprinkler Controller by chance last week and decided to give it a test drive and I’m blown away by how simple and effective it is. It took me probably around an hour to have it all setup and I can now control almost every aspect of the irrigation system from my HA front end and can easily bypass a zone and change run times.
I run a single “master” relay in conjunction with the 8 relay board which I use as a fail safe should a relay get stuck, if my master relay is off none of the other relays will open and whats nice with this controller is that it has a “pump” switch which works much the same as my “master” relay so I just add that to the valve settings and it switches that relay on before a cycle and then off once done.
I’d imagine there are other forum members who do the same and might benefit from this so thought I’d pop it on here.
