float switch besides ato for outlet control

[bishoptf]

Ignoring they notify part -

You can't do this with a single float switch without logic, be it a controller, latching relay or some other method to KEEP the return pump off once triggered.

What happens with a single float switch -

1 - Water evaporates and sump runs lows.
2 - float switch triggers
3 - pump turns off and water drains back into the sump from the display
4 - pump rises slightly and turns back on, pumping water out of sump.
5 - float drops and turns pump off
6 - water drains back from display, causing water in sump to slightly rise...

Over and over until the pump or float switch burn out or you find it cycling on and off every few seconds.

I know nothing about reef-pi but you need either two floats and latching circuit (software in reef-pi or hardware relay latch) or a one-shot type of trigger that stays "set" once triggered.

Yeah, thats the case for normal ATO usage, and reef-pi has the traditional ATO function and that works great, thats part of the issue though. The current logic for the ATO function has a timer built in to track pump usage, so when the pump comes on you have a failsafe to disable the pump after a set period of time. It keeps track of that time, there are some use cases where I am wanting to use a float switch for non ATO purposes so I do not want or need to track the pump usage time and right now in reef-pi there is no easy way to do this, there are ways outside of reef-pi which we discussed earlier that allow you to do what you want but it's more work than most are willing. I think @Sral is on to the right idea and I thought about doing it initially, you can define analog inputs via the ph portion but right now there is no driver that will expose the gpio pins so you can tell it what to watch, I think if we can get that exposed then we will have an easy way to add any type of on/off switch, be it a float switch etc that we can use for non ATO purposes.

Not sure if any of this makes sense but thats what some of us are trying to achieve.

 

[Bio]

With a esp32chip a relay and home assistant / node red you can make your ato do anything even have alexa tell you theirs a problem with your ato that's how i have mine