Rate control valves.

Hardware
1

Hi I have rate and section control functioning as expected on my field sprayer. LOVEIT! The field sprayer has the $500 motorized valves. I’m building a yard sprayer. I bought some motorized valves off Ali. On the bench supply they show 0.1amp draw. When I put them on the RC15 board the 12v out put sags to 4-5v and the motor doesn’t even twitch. The motorized valves on the sprayer that’s working are 10-15m and this valve is .2m so it’s not a cable issue.

Any ideas?

2

Sounds like you may be short circuiting the outputs? I believe the section drivers on the RC15 have an overcurrent or overtemperature protection, so that may explain why the voltage is sagging to the 4-5v level? Do you have a link to the valves and a diagram of how you have wired them?

3

These 2 wire valves have a yellow wire that is negative and a blue that is positive. When current is removed a large cap motors it closed. The three wire valves have a negative wire and positive down either brown or blue drives either direction.

4

The two wire when I reverse polarity the power supply shows zero amps. So they are polarity protected.

If I ”invert flow” I can drive the 3 wire either way. It just doesn’t function with the program.

5

I’m guessing by editing a line or two in the INO I’d be up and running but there’s two problems with that, the first is IDK which line and the other is my IDE doesn’t think the ISR’s are declared.

PulseISR was not declared in this scope

6

That sounds like solenoid valve to me.

Do you have links to the AliExpress valves?

The RC app should be able to handle any kind of valve without software modification.
Sometime you can also use an external relay if you need a special logic.

7

I just found this on AliExpress: C$32.93 | 1/2’’ 3/4’’ 1’’ 1-1/4’’ 2 Way Brass Electric Ball Valve 220V 24V 12V IP65 Waterproof Motorized Ball Valve Big Torque Metal Motor

I got the CR02 for the master and CR04 for the sections.

8

The RC15 code was not written in Arduino IDE. To get the code to compile in Arduino IDE make these changes, it’s just some moving things around: AOG_RC/Modules/ESP32 Rate/RC_ESP32/RC_ESP32.ino does not compile in Arduino IDE 2.3.6 · Issue #41 · SK21/AOG_RC · GitHub

1 Like
9

image
image1121×407 49.9 KB

image
image695×741 109 KB

For the CR04 section valves, since you have verified that they have polarity protection, there are two ways that you can wire it.
Option 1: Connect the yellow wires to a star ground. Connect the blue wires to S1, S2, S3, etc. Set the rate control app for 3 wire control.
Option 2: Connect the blue wire to S1A, connect the yellow wire to S1B, etc. Set the rate control app for 2 wire control.

image
image696×725 107 KB

For the CR02 master. Please tell me what you want the master valve to do. Does it turn off when all sections are off? Or does it vary how much spray comes out (rate control valve)?

10

For the master I want it to vary the amount of spray it puts on. I assumed it would also close when the “master” was switched off on the web UI. Maybe that is my issue.

11

A “master valve” is a valve that would turn off when all sections are off and would turn on when any sections are on.

You want a rate (control) valve.

For the CR02 rate valve connect yellow to ground, blue to M1A, brown to M1B. In the rate control app you may need to Invert Flow Control.

Set Products → Mode to 1
Set Products → Rate → Control Type to Standard Valve for a typical installation

Set Products → Rate → Control Type to Combo close if you want the rate control valve to close all the way down when all sections are off

If you only have one section you can just use the single rate control valve set to combo close and remove the section valve completely (assuming everything opens and closes and gets to rate fast enough for you).

1 Like