Is the driveway flooded?

Thu Feb 24 09:32:11 EST 2022

> On Feb 23, 2022, at 5:47 PM, Chad Gard <chad at holeinthewoodsfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> My main concern with a float switch solution is some critter making it so the floats can’t float, and/or chomping the wires.  I feel like I’d need to encase it in something that would let water in, but protect it from current - my present best solution is drain tile set vertically, with a cap on top.  But then that void, depending on its size, becomes attractive to mice, voles, rats, paper wasps, ants, woodpeckers, turtles, honeybees, bats, o‘possum, raccoons, ground squirrels, squirrels, etc.  Either directly, chomping on wires or physically getting in the way, or indirectly, building nests and whatnot, they could plug up the works.  Granted, it’s not like this would be a critical thing.  But, still.

Ah, thats a good thought. I would mount it inside a medium sized plastic waterproof box, they sell them at HD or other places for not too much money, but I suppose since we’re going to drill holes in it it doesn’t matter if it’s water proof ;) Then I’d drill at least 2 large, say 2” or more diameter holes along the side, and another on top so that the air can get out as the water comes up. Then just glue or screw hardware cloth over the openings. Mount the thing inside. Even if the screening gets clogged with grass or something it’s not going to make it completely waterproof ;) weed wack around it once a year and it will probably keep working just fine. You’d need to stake it down so it doesn’t float away but otherwise I think that would be inexpensive and work fine. But then I haven’t tried to do this exact thing before.

> 
> Zwave/etc. leak sensors might work, but seem expensive for what they are.  The last leak sensor I had was two wires on a clothespin held open by a baby aspirin, connected to an x10   DM10, and it worked as reliably as the x10 protocol allowed.  So the cost of a leak sensor seems a bit much.  I doubt the aspirin would work outdoors…

Yes, I agree, the ZWave stuff seems to be a bit pricy, but there are ones out now that are out there for under $30 bucks now. And some ZigBee ones that are even cheaper than that. i’ve had only limited success with ZigBee on the Vera, it’s much better but still not completely reliable for me on the Hubitat. 

If you can get a signal from a DS10 you can still use that, you’d just need to pair it with a device that would make a good output connection when it sensed water. There are lots of such things out there which have a simple on/off output that could be hacked onto a DS10 or any contact closure output. I haven’t used these just the first thing that came up in searching so not a direct recommendation but something like: https://www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-Moisture-Humidity-Sensitivity-Nickeled/ These have both an analog output that I guess would be used with an analog input to measure the amount of water, but they also APPEAR to have a digital on/off output as well which PROBABLY gets it’s sensitivity set with that little pot on the board. You MIGHT be able to use that directly with the DS10 depending on what the output is. The connections on the DS10 are just 1 to the battery negative or ground, and one to the input on the chip. They aren’t labeled so if you need to know which is which you have to use a meter to find which one is directly connected to the battery ground. If it doesn’t work to connect the power grounds for the 2 things together and then connect the digital output of the sensor to the other wire on the DS10 then you could get one of those arduino compatible relay boards with the isolated digital logic level inputs. They probably also cost about $5 or 6 bucks off amazon. Then put the DS10 or any other contact closure across the relay output. While I don’t have a complete solution here that I’ve already tested everything, I’m fairly sure this could be made to work ;) You would have to be willing to experiment and possibly lay in a few inexpensive items that would end up not working… But once you have that you could use any contact closure sensor, ZWave, Zigbee, WiFi Arduino whatever, even just run a long set of wires to something further away, but then you run into the lightning problem again.

> 
> I have one of those lidar sensors. Originally got it hoping to determine whether vehicles were coming or going in the driveway.  But I could never get it to work on my Arduino, including using other folks’ unaltered code.  I’m wondering if I got a defective one…  I might have to look up some of the waterproof max sonar sensors, though.  If nothing else, I’d like to measure water level in stock tanks…
> 
> Right now, though, neither my wifi nor zwave networks reach that far.  Addressing that is a priority this year - probably buying the hardware this summer, then installing it in the late fall/winter.  Farmer cash flow and schedule…. We’ll have bridges going to far points of the property (Steve sent me info on some that have been working great of him), but we’ll also need a few access points for places where we want good wifi coverage.

aotec makes ZWave expanders which I have used successfully with both the Vera and the Hubitat. They are about $20 each but require an outlet to be plugged into. If you just make a chain of them from building to building to get closer it could likely be made to work, but then you lose most of the benefits of a mesh network when it’s no longer a mesh.

> 
> Which brinsg up something of concern to me that you mentioned in your comments…  protecting outdoor ethernet in general…
> 
> I have a couple of challenges.  First, PoE devices obviously need to be hard wired.  I have a couple of PoE cameras on the house, but, want to install more further afield.  That brings up the lightning challenge. Also, for access points, bridges, and outdoor poe switches…  All of that can fit in various enclosures, probably at least some pole mounted.  But how to surge protect them?  I want to use managed switches for port security: no ripping my camera or access point off the pole/wall and plugging in your laptop to try to get a local / inside the firewall IP address.  But that negates the cheap/sacrificial hub possibility.  
> 
> Obviously not going to protect the switch/whatever from a direct strike to its pole, but I’m more concerned with the (long) cable runs and possibility of frying stuff on either end.  So, I currently plan to have ethernet surge protectors on both ends of cable runs.  But that makes for a lot of surge protectors.  There are a lot available, at many price points.  I know from solar surge protectors that some really don’t offer any protection at all, while others do quite well, and price doesn’t seem to be a factor.
> 

I have never lost ethernet because of a nearby lightning strike. I think there is at least some low level protection built into most of the interface chips they use but I”m not sure how much. Michael used to lose at least 1 ethernet port every time he had a really good storm. He used to buy these 20+ port ethernet switches off ebay that were cheap because they were a few years old and as the ports got fried just move to the next one down the line until they were used up and then he’d order another one ;) That being said I have added ethernet surge protectors for all my longer runs.

The one thing I did lose due to just the induced current from a nearby but not direct hit was some longer serial lines I was running through the attic. I have a bunch of multi-port rs232 adaptors on the xtension server that I’ve had forever and work great. So when I needed a weeder card in the garage to read a bunch of sensors I just pulled another ethernet cable through the attic and connected it to the weeder card there. So the slow speed serial was running over a couple of pairs in the cat-5. We took a close, but not direct hit once and I lost both the weeder card and the FTDI chip. I also lost a fancy communicating thermostat which also had an even less long wire connecting the control box at the furnace with the interface device down on a wall. When I replaced those items I also added RS232 surge protection to both ends of the line and haven’t had any problems since then.

There are some REALLY expensive ethernet or other srs232 like signal protectors that can actually protect you from anything short of attaching the other end to a model rocket and shooting it up into a lightning storm ;) They have gas discharge tubes and everything. But thats PROBABLY not necessary. 

There are also a lot of them out there which are really cheap and do not have a separate ground output. I would stay away from those as I don’t know where they shunt the voltage to. They probably just try to eat it up in MOV’s across the lines, which can move the surge from one line to another making things worse, or the MOV’s themselves can blow up or catch fire if you get a really good hit. I suspect that any medium range device that has a separate ground pigtail are the best to go for. There are some that even have gas discharge tubes as well like this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00805VUD8/  I haven’t used that model so this is not a direct recomendation, just the first one that seems to be what I would want that came up in a search. There are some that still have ground pigtails that are a big cheaper, but something like that. I do also think the use of a sacrificial cheap switch or hub is a good idea as well, especially if you’re actually having problems with such things. It can blow individual ports without sending the surge upstream to the real switch. But you’d have to figure out if it could supply the POE or whatever. And while I’m thinking about it you can get adaptors for the remote side of a POE ethernet that can give you just 5v out or 12v out or whatever you need and then pass the ethernet through to whatever device you want to connect to. Something like that would be perfect for getting power for a wiznet ethernet/serial card and an arduino or other serial based sensor that you might setup. Getting those contact closure output sensors above or any float switch to work with an arduino which could then send some serial data to XTension over a wiznet card directly attached to such a setup would be very simple. Using XTension’s Arduino interface and connecting to the wiznet cards ethernet and then the wiznet cards serial output to the arduino (you’d need to use the ttl level serial output on the card rather than the RS232 but it’s there just not on the plug that info is in the article on the wiki about putting an xBee onto a wiznet card) in the arduino code all youd have to do is something like:
Serial.println( “water=on”);
or 
Serial.println( “water=off”);

and then a unit assigned to the interface in XTension with it’s address set to “water” would receive those commands. So that part would be very simple to do from an arduino if you can get a network or serial connection in any way and then a device that is just a contact closure. Then you don’t have to mess with any of the more complex and expensive sensors.

But if you do want to check out the sonar devices for checking the levels in tanks, they have them that are specifically made for that and XTension can talk to them directly :) They work very well in those sorts of environments.

Thanks,
 James

James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com

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