afero

Connecting up to an Arduino makes this setup a whole other animal - rather than driving just the Modulo GPIO pins, you can send arbitrary data to the Arduino over SPI (or receive it from the Arduino, both ways). So you could, for this project, wire up a couple of relay boards to the outputs of a small Arduino compatible thing, and then feed the sprinkler head number to the Arduino over the Afero Cloud to have the Arduino flip it's GPIO bits as needed.For convenience, the 28 pins on the main side of the Modulo just HAPPEN to line up with the pinout of a PJRC Teensy. You could solder a stacking header to a Teensy, plug the Modulo in right on top of it, and more or less be good to go.

Hey! Good question, non-obvious answer. :) Currently the ASR-1 chip only provides 4 GPIO outputs so we only drove 4 sprinkler heads to show how simple the setup could be.Today, the only way I can think of that would drive more than 4 sprinklers would be to build two of this project (two Modulos, two relay boards, tied to the one power supply and in the same - but probably larger - enclosure) but you'd end up needing two profiles in the Afero app, one for one set of sprinklers on one Modulo and another profile for the other. It'd work just fine, but it wouldn't be as pretty as we'd like it to be.That's not to say there's not a better way of doing it, it's just that that's the only way I think it'd work /right now/. We have a bunch of enhancements we're working on to the platform, of cou...

Hey! Good question, non-obvious answer. :) Currently the ASR-1 chip only provides 4 GPIO outputs so we only drove 4 sprinkler heads to show how simple the setup could be.Today, the only way I can think of that would drive more than 4 sprinklers would be to build two of this project (two Modulos, two relay boards, tied to the one power supply and in the same - but probably larger - enclosure) but you'd end up needing two profiles in the Afero app, one for one set of sprinklers on one Modulo and another profile for the other. It'd work just fine, but it wouldn't be as pretty as we'd like it to be.That's not to say there's not a better way of doing it, it's just that that's the only way I think it'd work /right now/. We have a bunch of enhancements we're working on to the platform, of course, and there are a couple of ones in the queue that would answer your question a couple of different ways. But two Modulos and two profiles its the only way I think it would work today (sorry).I really appreciate your comments though. Questions like this really help us figure out which enhancements we need to prioritize! Thank you!

I know you said "without an Arduino" but thinking about it this would actually be really easy with one. The Modulo can talk SPI to an Arduino, and you could easily send an arbitrary integer to the Arduino from the Afero Profile, which could then set one of the Arduino GPIO pins attached to relay boards. An Instructable on using SPI with the Modulo is coming soon, that may show that it's the way to go!