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Demise of Wunderground and reliability improvements

A project log for Sprinkler System Water Conservation

This project uses weather API's to determine if significant rain has fallen, or is forecast, and if so disables the sprinkler system.

chrisChris 04/21/2019 at 01:160 Comments

With the demise of the Wunderground API as a free service I have converted my program to use other services for the current and forecast rainfall. This functionality has been broken out into separate modules, so it should be fairly easy to replace these with services of your choice.

Another key improvement has been the addition of retry with back-off functionality to HTTP requests to deal with the un-reliability of HTTP requests and servers, this maximises the chance of getting valid readings.

Connecting to WiFi has also been a problem occasionally and this is now handled by retry functionality, with the device going into deep sleep between tries to conserve  the battery.

The system has performed well over this summer with very few missing readings due to errors and should be even better next summer with WiFi retry in place.

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