I want to add to my IoT-based water pump control application the ability to sense whether the pump is actually running. The reason is that on several occasions the pump has been “asked” to turn on by firmware running on Borons but either the pump’s circuit breaker has tripped or the pump controller has been damaged by lighting and no one can tell remotely that the pump isn’t actually running.
If the above device - or an alternative that anyone might suggest - will do the job, how would I interface it to my NCD relay board with attached Boron. Probably I2C I suspect.
Would I also be correct that I would need to include the Current_Monitor library in my app?
If there is agreement that this is the best solution, then I will ask for some more advice about how/where to attach the ‘sensor core’ to one of the wires to/from the pump. The attached photo of my setup shows that there is a rather significant problem where the wires enter the cabinet in the lower right: no room for the sensor.
UPDATE: I just realized that the current on the wires entering the cabinet from the pump will always have current of them if a relay is closed but the pump is not running. That circuit isn’t feeding the pump directly but, rather, is activating a relay in the pump controller, i.e. even if the pump is not running, the relay will stay closed. So I want to put the monitor’s sensor directly on a wire feeding the pump, i.e. outside my cabinet.
Next question: I believe I saw somewhere that the sensor’s wire leads are 5 feet long or thereabouts. Is there any reason I could not splice it with something longer? The distance between my control enclosure and the pump is probably about 15 feet or so.
Another issue that maybe you can comment on: you may have noticed in my photo that my system is quite redundant, i.e. two NCD relay boards, two Borons, two power supplies and two high-voltage relays (had a Boron fail a couple of months ago; bad situation at the time). Both Borons execute the exact same code. If one fails or otherwise goes off line for whatever reason (cellular signal strength sucks but surprisingly when one Boron goes off line for that reason, the other typically does not; completely random). So as long as one of the Borons is connected to the cloud, the pump can be controlled. If the current monitor is connected to only one of the NCD boards via I2C, is there any way to also connect it to the other board as well? I’d obviously like to avoid having to purchase two monitors just to insure that we can ‘see’ the current from either Boron.
I apologize for my ignorance: how, exactly, would the single current monitor connect to both Borons? Obviously, if I had just a single Boron, the I2C cable that comes with the monitor should be all I’d need, right? But I cannot find a I2C cable splitter anywhere that would allow the single monitor to feed two Borons.
Other questions:
I assume that the Current Monitor will be powered from its connected NCD relay/Boron assembly via the I2C cable. Is that correct?
I also assume that there is no need to populate the Monitor with its own Boron. Is that correct?
Ah HA! That’s what I thought and why I asked the question. I couldn’t figure out how to “share” one monitor board with two borons, so I was quite pleased when you earlier said that I could because that meant I only needed to purchase one monitor board rather than two. Now my budget just doubled.
Can you answer the other two questions in my previous post?
you will only need ONE current sensor board not two. two boron can talk to it. you will need to build cable assembly to connect the board with both boron.
