This thread has been quiet for a long time... So, here's some news.
I now have two
rainmachine touch hd-16s ($10 less on amazon) installed (in different locations) and have learned a lot about this product. These controllers replaced two netAquas. The netAqua was a promising product that never realized it's potential and the company finally went belly up last year. I kept on using it until one simply stopped responding and I decided enough was enough, and I didn't want to support two different irrigation platforms. Compared to the netAqua, the rainmachine is minuscule. The only advantage I can see for the netAqua platform was the, essentially, unlimited number of zones. The rainmachine is limited to 16. Though, you can install multiple controllers and they say they will provide a means for linking programs between machines in the future. In my case, replacing the netAqua came down to two choices: rainmachine or Rachio. I went with the rainmachine for two reasons: local display an control capability and local network management (I.e. cloud not required).
With the rain machines installed I had three tasks I wanted to perform:
- Add a physical Ethernet interface
- Add some local control via Indigo
- Configure the weather services
While not officially supported, adding the physical interface can be done. Though, it is still a work in progress, it is working. The rainmachine comes with two USB ports. One is used for the Wi-Fi adapter and the other is free. I plugged in an Apple USB Ethernet adapter and then, via ssh access to the rainmachine, was able to configure it. Unfortunately, I cannot disable the Wi-Fi without losing all network access and dhcp does not work (yet) on the Ethernet port. But, I have assigned a static IP and it does work.
Adding Indigo local control was fairly simple. I did it all with a shell script which used curl to invoke RESTful API calls to the rainmachine. Since the whole point of this product is to automatically manage my irrigation needs, in spite of
Jay's work on the Rachio, I was not really looking for a plugin based solution. Rather, I just wanted a simple control page to let me wander around the property and manually start and stop zones, mostly for maintenance purposes. For other control purposes the rainmachine app or their web interface (both local and via their redirector) works just fine.
- Control page screenshot
- IMG_2072.PNG (246.04 KiB) Viewed 9047 times
Finally, weather services. I was surprised at the number of choices, including Underground PWSs. So, in my US location, where I have a Davis weather station, I was able to use that directly since it is shared as a PWS. If you provide more than one weather source (which I did) the rainmachine will basically average them, but give priority to a PWS if you want it to. So, you can use a local Netatmo rain gauge to act as a sanity check against a weather service's reports.
I'd be happy to share my work, just PM me. But, one caveat. This is not "plugin easy." You will need to know how to access the terminal, use shell commands and (for Ethernet support) use vi.