The video below goes over how to create a Simple Timer within the Irrigation Tab of Portal 2.0. This video and others can be found at our Growlink University webpage.
Audio Transcript:
While our Copilot crop steering program offers great utility for irrigation management, sometimes a series of basic timers are all that's desired. For these circumstances, we're going to want to create a simple timer irrigation program.
To do this, we must first navigate to our Irrigation dashboard. Once on the Irrigation dashboard, we will click the Add New button in the bottom right corner and then select Simple Timer. This will bring us to the Simple Timer Creation Wizard.
The first step in the Simple Timer Creation Wizard is the Information tab where we will enter the information needed to create our program.
Let's go through the fields together, starting with the naming of the program.Since I'm creating a program for Zone one in my room, I'll name it Zone 1.
Next, I'll select the substrate type I am using, followed by the substrate sensor I want to pull data from. Since this is just a simple timer program, having a substrate sensor is not required, though without it we will lose some charting functionality on the schedule page.
Next, I'll select the valve I want to program to open and close, and finally I'll enter the size of the emitters I'm using along with how many I have in each plan.
If you are using a Growlink fertigation skid and wish to use direct injection rather than a batch tank, you can select which recipe you want to dose here. Otherwise, just leave that field blank.
Once I have everything entered, I'll press Next to move on to the final step in the Creation Wizard.
The final step, also known as the Schedule page is where we will actually create our timers. The graph at the top is used to display sensor data. Assuming you selected a substrate sensor in the previous step, by default a single timer will come pre-populated.
These are the data fields needed to create a timer.
Start time meaning what time do we want this timer or timer sequence to start.
Duration meaning how long do we want each irrigation event or events to last.
Interval meaning how long in between irrigation events do we want to wait and frequency meaning how many times do we want said irrigation event to repeat.
On the very right we have a toggle button which allows us to temporarily enable or disable that specific timer.
Notice how it says OT on the left hand side. This stands for Once Off Timer, meaning a timer that will occur only once at a specified time because only one irrigation event is occurring.
In this scenario, the Interval tab is disabled. If we want to change this timer into a repeating timer sequence, all we would need to do is update the frequency field to be greater than one.
When I make this change to the frequency, notice how the OT has now changed to RT, which stands for Recycle Timer, letting you know at a quick glance that this timer sequence will repeat. Now, since there are more than one irrigation events occurring, our Interval tab becomes editable again, allowing us to specify how long in between each event we want to wait.
To add a new timer or timer sequence, I'll press Create New Timer, which will generate a new default timer for us to edit.
To delete a program, simply press the red trash can icon to the right.
Once saved, a list of individual timer events will populate along with a tool tip displaying the estimated total volume of water being dispensed from this event for the day.