In drought-struck states like California, United States, there are severe restrictions on water usage in certain parts of the state. For example: In summer, some cities passed an ordinance restricting water usage to 250 gallons per day. In such states, it is ridiculous to find lawn sprinklers going off the day before the rain. We are going to build a lawn sprinkler controller that only turns on when there is no rain predicted for the next day.
In order to build a smart lawn sprinkler, we need a flow control solenoid valve (for example, https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10456). Make sure that the valve can meet the water pressure requirements. This flow control valve can be interfaced to the Raspberry Pi Zero using a transistor switching circuit discussed in earlier chapters or the relay board we discussed earlier in this chapter.
- We will be making use of DarkSky API (https://darksky.net) to...
