Connecting and Controlling a Motorized Ball Valve

Overview

A ball valve is a form of quarter-turn valve which uses a hollow, perforated and pivoting ball to control flow of liquids and gasses through it. This tutorial will guide you through connecting the board to a 3 Wire-Valve and writing a sketch that controls the basic operations such as the opening and closing of the valves.

Tip : If this is for your first Edge Control project, we recommend you to take a look at the Getting Started Tutorial to setup the development environment before you proceed.

Goals

• How to connect a motorized valve to the Edge Control board
• How to control the valve through basic commands provided by the

  Arduino_EdgeControl

  library
• How to power the board with an external power supply

Required Hardware and Software

• Arduino Edge control board
• 1x US Solid Motorised Ball Valve (9 - 24 V) (or compatible)
• External power source: 12V battery (LiPo / SLA) or power supply
• 1x Micro USB cable
• Arduino IDE 1.8.10+
• 2x Phoenix Connectors
• 2x Jumper cables

Instructions

1. Connecting the Valves

The motorized valve comes with three wires primarily marked as blue, yellow and red. The red and blue cables are for the positive and negative signals and the yellow is for the ground.

Before you attach the wires to the board you need to ensure that the Phoenix connectors are in place

The Latching Circuitry A Latching Circuit has 2 inputs for Positive(P) and Negative(N) signals and 1 output. Latches allows you to store the previous state of the signal that passes through either of the pins and maintains the state until you pass a new signal. Signal passed through the positive and the negative pins will also determine the direction of the signal to the valve. The Edge Control board comes with 8 pairs of Latches each labeled from 1N:1P up to 8N:8P.

Connect the red and the blue wire to

1N

1P

Latching_out

Latching_out_cmd

Connect the yellow wire to the nearby

GND

2. Opening And Closing the Valves

Open a new sketch file on the Arduino IDE and name it

ValveControl.ino

Arduino_EdgeControl.h

Copy
1#include <Arduino_EdgeControl.h>

Inside

void setup()

EdgeControl.begin()

Latching.begin()

Copy
1void setup(){
2    Serial.begin(9600);
3    while(!Serial);
4    
5    delay(1000);
6
7    Serial.println("3-Wire Valve Demo");
8
9    EdgeControl.begin();
10    Latching.begin();
11
12    Serial.println("Starting");
13}

As mentioned earlier, the 2 Input Pins of the latching circuit are primarily used to control the direction of the output signal. The

<Arduino_EdgeControl.h>

Latching.channelDirection(LATCHING_OUT_1, direction)

Inside the

loop()

Latching.channelDirection()

LATCHING_OUT_1

POSITIVE

NEGATIVE

Copy
1Latching.channelDirection(LATCHING_OUT_1, POSITIVE)

and to close the valve, you need to send a signal in the opposite direction using the command,

Copy
1Latching.channelDirection(LATCHING_OUT_1, NEGATIVE)

As it takes a few seconds for the valve to fully open or close, you need to maintain the signal for a set amount of time. Using the command,

Latching.strobe(4500)

Copy
1void loop(){
2    Serial.println("Closing");
3    Latching.channelDirection(LATCHING_OUT_1, POSITIVE);
4    Latching.strobe(4500);
5    delay(2500);
6
7    Serial.println("Opening");
8    Latching.channelDirection(LATCHING_OUT_1, NEGATIVE);
9    Latching.strobe(4500);
10    delay(2500);
11}

3. Connecting To A Power Source

The valves require a power supply of 9 - 12 V and you can either use a regular power supply or a 3 cell LiPo battery to provide the required voltage. Power sources can be connected to the relay ports on the edge control board, ensure that you have a source that can provide 9 - 12 V of power for both the valve and the board. Connect two jumper wires to the GND and B pins of the Relay ports.

Connect the jumper from the B pin to the positive terminal of the battery and the jumper from the GND pin to the negative terminal of the battery.

4. Uploading the Sketch

Connect the board to your computer, upload the

ValveControl.ino

Open

Close

Conclusion

In this tutorial you learned how a 3 wire valve works and the basic operations that the Edge Control board uses to control the valves. With this knowledge you can build irrigation systems that periodically control the valves, which can be installed in your fields.

Complete Sketch

Copy
1#include <Arduino_EdgeControl.h>
2
3void setup(){
4    Serial.begin(9600);
5    while(!Serial);
6
7    delay(1000);
8
9    Serial.println("3-Wire Valve Demo");
10
11    EdgeControl.begin();
12    Latching.begin();
13
14    Serial.println("Starting");
15}
16
17void loop(){
18    Serial.println("Closing");
19    Latching.channelDirection(LATCHING_OUT_1, POSITIVE);
20    Latching.strobe(4500);
21    delay(2500);
22
23    Serial.println("Opening");
24    Latching.channelDirection(LATCHING_OUT_1, NEGATIVE);
25    Latching.strobe(4500);
26    delay(2500);
27}