This is a Boron LTE borad with another one. I can't find the board brand or model. Any one has idea or other boards recommend?
the board function must have
control solenoid valve, 24V AC or 5V DC
best to have:
2. can control two solenoids at a board
3. can monitor pressure (yes, with additional pressure meter)
4. can contact solar charge(no must)
Later on need:
5. GPS information, to show location
Please take a look and let me know if this is in the ball park. If so, I could relatively easily update it and change it over to the Boron.
I am also looking at using LoRA for agricultural use cases as a farm could have a number of sensors and actuators and LoRa could save money and enable longer battery life.
For this use case, I built a custom board it is not that expensive if you are willing / able to source the parts and solder them together. I like this approach as I get a device that is exactly what I want and this device has proven to be very rugged / reliable working for the past 5 years.
That said, with the Feather form-factor, they're pre-built solutions that may meet your needs. NCD has a number of options that work with Particle:
Often times those Rivulis Valves are actually Regulating Control Valves.
In other words, they operate as Pressure reducing valves within a control scheme.
From the picture, it appears to have the water tubing for the pilot valve to operate the valve as a regulator.
I mention this because you might Not be dealing with a "Solenoid" Valve.
This particular application may be depending on the Rivulis controlling the downstream pressure or flow, maybe not ?
Whether or not you have power is going to decide a lot about what kind of device you need to buy / build.
For grid power situations, you can get away with a simple system that includes:
Boron
AC / DC transformer for power for the Boron and peripherals
Relay or two to drive AC solenoids
Pressure sensor or two that could either be pressure switches (my preferred) or pressure transducers (either 4-20mA or 0-5V)
For off-grid power situations, which is most large ag, its quite a bit more complicated. You would need:
Boron
Battery + Solar (the complicated part). Solar is required due to the Boron's power consumption and the panel needs to be above the canopy; there are systems that don't require solar that are built on 900mhz, see Nelson Irrigation
DC Latching solenoids (important because they don't require constant current)
H-Bridge + capacitor setup to drive the solenoids
Pressure transducers, as above
Looking at the PCB image, I am a little confused about what kind of power and solenoid setup you have. It looks like a Baccara G75-0-11-4... 9V-12V dc latching solenoid. The only problem is that there is not a capacitor to drive a latching solenoid on that PCB. It may be that the boron and sensors are running on battery + solar and just switching power to an AC solenoid coming from a central point. It's also possible they left off the cap and hacked something together.
This is the product I helped develop (on the Particle platform): https://altrac.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/360004614654-Valves-ST160-161-. I no longer work there, but can get you in touch with someone that does work there if you are interested. Altrac is owned by Semios today and continues to sell both Altrac devices and a Nelson Irrigation integration.
For battery/power, this is no what I am concerned.
The point you said need a DC latch solenoid, it is new for me.
We have different farms.
Some close AC power and most setup with a timer controller. So we have all power ready. Just want to upgrade to iot remote control.
And, yes, pressure sensor will give us a good feedback to make sure it is running.
For DC latch solenoid, I saw a 5V solenoid in other farm. If just a purse to turn on switch, it should not require high current, right?
For the Relay or two to drive AC solenoids, because these relays have been setup with a timer controller.
I am thinking if I just wire them from timer to a board. Then Boton give it a signal to turn it. Then I don't need total a separate system. At the same time, this will allow the timer controller to continue as a manual control.
There are a lot of different solenoids in the world, so I don't want to speculate on what you have. If you have close up pictures of the solenoids, then I could give you a better idea of how to drive them.
For the AC solenoids, you could probably piece together something like this:
The DC latching solenoids are a bit different, as they are normally two wire and you have to be able to send a pulse in both directions. In a custom PCB you would have an H-bridge driver that allowed for this and a capacitor to deal with the pulsed current. To put something like this together with prototyping parts, you would need something like this:
