Irrigation Controller powered by Home Assistant and ESPHome Sprinkler Controller Integration by Andrea (frieduser)

I learned a lot along the way and I thank all who gave me inspirations on solving issues; special thanks to @Alaric (who inspired me for the ESPCode), @ThaNerd (helped with lovelace interface)

see https://community.home-assistant.io/t/irrigation-controller-powered-by-esphome/703074 for more clarifications

Overview

I’ve done a tailored irrigation system on my needs, leveraging on:

• Esphome sprinkler controller platform https://esphome.io/components/sprinkler.html
• Home Assistant Automation
• Irrigation Dashboard with some HACS addons
• Single package file with all configurations (input_*, statistics and automation) I’ve a 4 zones lawn and two other zones: flowerbed and strawberries.

My needs

What I needed is:

• Schedule with a time for a single irrigation in the day
• Frequency in days: every day, every two days and so on
• Disable a specific day, for example on Saturday if I know I’ll have a barbecue with friends; the irrigation will be done the following day
• For lawn, that has 4 zones, leveraging on Auto Advance option available in esphome/sprinkler, we can schedule just the lawn, not every single zone

Other features

Other options:

• There’s a system to count rainfall in order to avoid watering (postponed) or decrement irrigation time (in %, using multiplier_number in esphome)
• There’s a flag to enable a zone – or the lawn – to be rain aware for what available in previous point
• It’s possible to enable/disable scheduler
• The chance to watering manually
• Set up irrigation time in minutes with limits (60 min in my setup)

HACS addons

I've used:

• custom:button-card
• custom:numberbox-card
• custom:slider-entity-row
• custom:time-picker-card Please add-on them before enable dashboard

Components

There are three software components of the irrigation systems:

• irrigation dashboard
• irrigation package is the core:
  • automation are triggered on time, then it evaluates (conditions) weekday if it's enabled, in the actions parts:
    • evaluates full rain day (match on number of tips to avoid irrigation) in order to set skipdays variable
    • evaluates not enough rain (less than number of tips needed) to set progressive irrigation (in %)
    • then irrigate, under certain conditions
• irrigation esphome code The hardware components are:
• esp32 board, mine is POE
• rele board, powered at 12VDC
• Optocoupler board, translate 12VDC pulses to 3.3VDC logic
• Tipping Bucket Rainfall Sensor - powered at 12VCC because of long distance (>3m), so no false pulse are recorded

Screnshots

Please see:

• Lovelace screenshots
  • Irrigation
  • Rain section (with some controls for testing)
  • Maintenance dashboard
• Notification examples
• Esphome code (I’ve used POE ESP32 platform)
  • Rain gauge (reed switch to count every tip) has been used with 3.3V/12V Optocoupler – no need to debounce pulses
  • I’ve not used counter integration because I’ve preferred to leverage on home assistant statistics

Happy to answer to your questions.

Some screenshots are better than more words:

Main Dashboard

Rain Dashboard

Settings Dashboard

please pay attention on "Lawn Auto Advance" binary switch used to watering all sprinklers under a controller

Message Dashboard

(not used at the moment)

Persistent Notification

Here you can find irrigation messages on delay, execution and future schedulings

Irrigation package:

add Studio Code Server add-on for your convenience

ESPHome screnshot:

Just to show a part of the code

Credit: