Lack of local control is what killed Rachio for me. I’m also not into my lawn to care about things like root depth. I guess all I wanted was green grass, local and remote control and the system to not water while it’s raining also have the system adjust watering times based on local weather. Rainmachine does all that and more. I’m still not sure what I’ll have Smartthings do with Rainmachine but I’m glad it’s available.
Now you can make your sprinklers coordinate with music! Just like Bellagio
Now that it’s integrated with ST, you can make ST the intelligence layer. There’s opportunities to use data from your local weather station, or sites like WeatherUnderground provided that the data is more accurate for your area.
Like @cooperglee said, you can integrate with moisture sensor like the ones sold by http://www.eveirrigation.com/
Personally, I’d like to pause my sprinklers when I shower automagically, that has been my motivation to get it into ST for myself.
All those will need new SmartApps to be written, which in time will come as long as there’s key players like Rachiio coming into ST ecosystem.
Pausing while showering could be a reality with the latest Beta version for Rachio… - just a matter of how you want to detect your shower You could do it with a motion sensor in the bathroom, moisture sensor in the tub, or an electronic pressure meter on the house pipes (or under the sink)…
Just wrapping up integration with Flower Power and it is a reality - just building the pairing to the Rachio Zones now so that you can optionally have it “skip” the zone if the moisture is too high and/or automatically turn the Zone on if the moisture has gotten too low…
@copyninja since the pause command is not yet supported, the only integration with ST and RainMachine I think can help me is push notifications when programs run. I noticed in the code that you define the zones as contact sensors but when I go to use the “Notify Me” app, it does not let me select the Rain Machine zones your program created. Any ideas how to get notifications working? It’s one degree out here in NY and all I can think of is green grass and nice weather to take my mind off the reality!
@copyninja As I sit here on March 28th watching snow fall, I can’t help but think of spring! Anyway, I was playing around with the RainMachine smartapp and setting up alerts when my program runs. I noticed a few things:
- The Refresh Polling built into the app does not work
- As a work around, I used Pollster to Refresh status of the zones and programs, (Polling didn’t work there either, which could be the problem with your Service Manager app), but I noticed the zones/programs keep flip flopping from “Active” to “Inactive” even if they are not stopping after I initiate a program. This effects notifications as I hoped to be alerted daily when my program runs, but the flip flopping keeps sending me false positives. Any ideas? Or is this a problem with the RainMachine API?
I had this installed and working on my old IPhone. When I try to install it fails and the SmartThings app crashes.
It appears based on an email I got from the author he is unable to work on this app due to workload.
Am I the only person that this app no longer works on SmartThings ? Anyone have any idea how to fix the problem or anyone up to writing working code?
It works for me, but it’s buggy. (See my above comments, nothing’s changed).
this is the log from when I try to install
e4c04c23-7d0a-4ca3-b3fd-434bf40d585a 4:52:48 PM: debug getChildDevices(true), children=0
e4c04c23-7d0a-4ca3-b3fd-434bf40d585a 4:48:32 PM: error org.apache.http.conn.ConnectTimeoutException: Connect to 192.168.0.18:80 timed out @ line 329
e4c04c23-7d0a-4ca3-b3fd-434bf40d585a 4:48:22 PM: debug HTTP POST : null
Any thoughts ?
Well, this is just déjà vu from the MyQ app. Since my schedulerFix code seems to have made that more stable, I just applied the same logic to this app as well. If you’d like to try it, grab the modified version here:
Just paste it over - no need to reinstall. You will want to reinitialize it, though (just click through the setup options) so that the new scheduler will start.
Basically, this spins up a second scheduled job that runs every 5 minutes and checks to see if the original job is still alive. It checks the last time the refresh was run, and if it’s missed more than 2 runs (based on user-selected polling interval), it restarts that job. Because the monitoring job is so lightweight, it tends to be less likely to die the silent death of the usual refresh schedule.
Thanks. I ended up selling my RainMachine when the Rachio went on sale on Amazon. I liked the API and integration options with Rachio. Haven’t regretted my decision to this point.
Good to know. If the Eve turns out well, I’ll probably just switch to that eventually.
New Rain Machine Touch HD 12 became available today.
Just got mine (Touch HD 12). Busy hooking it up by itself and getting the 9 zones not to leak, but I hope to figure out how to connect it to ST later.
Do you know how it differs from the previous Touch HD 12? I bought one in December I assume is the older one. I’m starting to question its decision-making. I want my lawn watered pretty heavily but only once every 3-4 days a week. Here in TN, we get random thunderstorms almost every day in the summer, and it seems like Rainmachine ends up skipping days preemptively often even when it only rains for like 5 minutes. Then, because I have it set to water only ever 3 days, it seems to completely reset the “next watering” time for another 3 days rather than just set the schedule to run the next day since we didn’t get substantial rain.
The most frustrating thing for me is not being able to easily see a history of exactly how long each zone ran for the past week. It just has that one graph where you try to squint and guesstimate how much the last day in the graph represents. I’m trying to use this Smartthings as my detailed zone on/off history, but I’m not totally convinced that’s working 100% either.
Really starting to wonder if I should have gone with the Rachio.
you can try calling /api/4/dailystats externally for past 14 days
http://docs.rainmachine.apiary.io/
Good news is that the API is pretty cool.
Bad news is my model is only hwVer 1.0, which means it does not seem to support any of the /water commands which are the ones I’m most interested in since they seem to show exact start/stop times by program. Trying to hit any of these just gives me “Invalid request.”
The dailystats is somewhat useful but does not actually tell me which programs ran on any given day. Dailystats/details also does not work (returns 500 server error). I can’t believe they don’t even store a “lastrun” value on each program.
At least on my new unit, in the iOS app, I can look at detailed history of watering. Under Setting>Watering History, it lists detailed scheduled vs actual times. That might help you figure out it if it watered.
The weird thing is the new models only work via the app, as the web browser interface is not yet working (confirmed by tech support). For me so far, it has worked pretty well, but as we have had no rain (Seattle this crazy summer), it has mostly just changed duration to account for temperature.
@simnick Nick here in Sacramento we had a slight rain 2/10 fall about 2 weeks back. It dropped my watering to 90 % of normal. I love the thing so far.
I got an e-mail a little while ago from support. They confirmed that that level of detail isn’t available in the older unit. It’s on the roadmap, but they don’t have an ETA, sadly. I guess my only option for now is to either get up at 4:30am to see if my programs run or else set out a measuring cup and check it each morning, heh. I’m definitely not paying $250 for a new one!
Sadly, it looks like they are getting platform fragmentation, as you don’t get that data on older units, and I don’t get web browser access. There must be some fundamental differences at the hardware and OS level if this code can’t be easily deployed across the units.