“As you will see, just a simple system that turns the water on or off was not sufficient. I will show you all aspects of this Arduino based system in this article and provide the source code.
The difference to basic automated watering
There are plenty of projects out there that automate irrigation. Many focus on the problem of automatically reacting to dry soil by opening a single valve, but a fully automated system with one valve is not what I want for my lawn. I do not want the sprinklers to turn on unexpectedly and I had to solve a different type of problem: Managing a specific irrigation program with individual control over each sprinkler.
For my setup there are two problems I had to address. The first one is that the very first pipe that is directly attached to our groundwater pump is too thin to support all sprinklers required to cover our lawn. The pipe goes through the wall of our garage and at some point I will probably replace it with a larger one, but even then the output current will be too limited to run everything at once. I need to run the sprinkler sequentially to achieve sufficient pressure to get the range I need.”