Swimming Pool daemon


Pool Main

The "C" program. Features Up to 6 relays. (Set by a constant so trivial to increase) Relay channel can force another relay channel to activate. Useful as most booster pumps require the filter pump to be on before booster is activated. Up to 4 temperature probes. (Set by constant so trival to increase, Hardware limits to 7 analog channels though.) Temperature probes can be either 10K or 50K thermistors. 10K thermistors are pretty standard for pool probes and I had a bunch of 50K Vishay thermistors for extra temperature probes. But if you have other thermistors, just add an entry with the thermistors constants into the table. Any relay can be activated if a freeze condition is detected. Controller setup The program runs all the time as a daemon, and is started in the rc.local on the beaglebone. I also discovered an even cheaper version of the beaglebone called a beaglebone green(BBG), which drops the HDMI output. I opted to go with this even more barebones version since I did not need HDMI. From bone scratch, I did the following to the BBG. Setup my wireless network using wicd-curses. Initial login is via hard wired ethernet port. Add the line CAPE="cape-bone-iio" to capemgr.sh in /etc/init.d. This sets up analog. In rc.local change #!/bin/sh -e to #!/bin/sh +e to ignore errors In rc.local add echo 41 > /sys/class/gpio/export to make a gpio pin available. In my case, I made a total of 6 pins available. In rc.local add echo none > /sys/class/leds/beaglebone\:green\:usr1/trigger to make led usr1 available for program use. In my case I setup led1 and led2 for program use. In /etc fix localtime with a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/??? wherever you are located. Turn off any services you are not going to need. In my case I disabled apache, cloud9, avahi, bluetooth, xrdp and jekyll-autorun. I also uninstalled some stuff that is not used to free up some space. Probably unnecessary as the controller does not write anything to disk. I also tweaked up the cron.* directories to eliminate any unnecessary stuff and added a script to update a file called /etc/timestamp with the date once per day. I also tweaked up the way the BBG sets up the time to query a machine on my network for the current date/time. The setting is located in the file /etc/default/ntpdate. Because the BBG does not have a real time clock, setting up the way it handles the date is a little more important. Note the C program waits a bit as it is started before the BBG has established the correct time, as rc.local is fired before the BBG has joined the network.