ICEthS1 Web Based Sprinkler Controller and Watering System

I bought this sprinkler controller 4 years ago. At the time it was the only affordable wifi controller you could buy. I paid $180 for it. Now they're selling them for $70.It is designed to be programmed and function solely within your home wifi network, not away from home, and actually recommends that you connect it directly to your home router via an ethernet cable. To get away-from-home control or in-home wifi (in case you don't have/want a 50 foot ethernet cable running through your house) you have to add an ethernet wifi adapter and then gerry-rig your home router to allow a firewall pinhole. There is absolutely no manual method of programming or running it.This system more or less worked for me at various levels of success. However, I recently switched internet providers which means a different router and had to reprogram the irrigationcaddy. To do this, I have to disconnect it from its mounting location and bring it to where I can connect it directly to my router via ethernet. Before attempting to change the IP/MAC settings I updated the irrigationcaddy to the latest firmware version using their firmware upgrade software. From that point on the caddy was effectively dead - the router did not recognize it even though it was hardwired. I tried several different ethernet cables and different ethernet ports, but nothing worked. Thought I'd roll back the firmware to what it was when it was functioning but the firmware upgrade software didn't work anymore and would not recognize the caddy.Biggest problem with KG Controls is their total lack of support. No phone number, just an email link that goes unanswered. You're completely on your own. After several hours trying to get the caddy to even be recognized by my router I gave up and ordered an Orbit B-hyve. It took about 30 minutes to install and another couple minutes to get connected on my home network. It is controlled by an app that you can access from anywhere in the world (imagine that concept) but it also has manual programming/running capabilities. And its cost wasn't much more than what KG is charging for their substandard product.

For recent several years, my state has been suffering severe drought climate. This year, it is even worse than ever and the city I live has imposed strict water usage rules including designated day-of-week based irrigation scheduling with monetary penalties for violations. I tried reprogramming our 20-year-old Rainbird irrigation controller for our front yard lawn and back yard orchards and vegetable garden, but I found the controller did not work well on day-of-week based programming (it worked fine on every X day scheduling, and it did feature day-of-week scheduling). I didn't think it was because of aging and rather thought it was an existing bug in the controller.At any rate, I decided it was a good time to replace the old irrigation controller with a smarter one and started shopping around. I am a high-tech engineer and I was particularly interested in "smart home gadgets" in recent years including irrigation controllers. So, it was fun to shop around.Conclusion first. I find the IrrigationCady ICEthS1 is a near-perfect match with my requirements and preferences among several similar smart irrigation controllers available in the market. It's been about a month since I installed it in our downstairs closet, I've been very happy to see it work as intended, although I have a long wish list as well.First, the around-$100 price including a 24VAC transformer is very good. Other competitor products usually carry $200-300 price tags which I cannot afford. This price is I guess possible because it has only necessary (but satisfactorily enough) hardware features. For example, ICEthS1 has no fancy LCD or touch panel UI that would be very seldom used once it is installed in a closet. Another cost-saving is lack of WiFi (there is a WiFi IrrigationCaddy model with a higher price tag). In our house's particular case, the closet where I installed my IrrigationCaddy serves as a "downstairs network center" and it houses network switches, WiFi AP, NAS, Arlo house monitoring camera base station, and other network devices. So, it was a tiny piece of cake to run a 2-foot Ethernet cable for my IrrigationCaddy, but every household may have its own situation.As to networking, I generally dislike to use WiFi for this kind of stationary network devices because WiFi not only is less reliable (or at least no more reliable) than wired Ethernet but also requires SSID/passcode settings. Reliability may not be an issue in reality, but, if it happens, it's difficult to notice the disconnection for this kind of set-and-forget device which is seldom accessed. Another thing is that our home WiFi disables SSID broadcasting for a security reason. If a WiFi gadget connects only to a broadcast SSID, which is often seen on simple gadgets, it will be a problem for us.The IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1's body is a rectangle-shaped shallow plastic box with only a power LED but no other indicators or switches/buttons. The installation ear-tabs on both sides make wall installation much easier than hidden screw-head hanging slots on the rear. Some competitor products are like a pastel colored disc, but I have never wanted to decorate our living room wall with an irrigation controller, and this simple and practical design is perfect.One caveat is that the rain sensor terminal block is smaller in size than valve and power terminals. I had to look for a smaller screw driver in my tool box. To me, this does not make much sense because an existing rain sensor was connected with wires of the same gage as valves (because of the same amperage) and there's no reason to make this smaller. This rain sensor port is not a hard-wired valve gateway/switch. Rather, it is a sensor input to the internal intelligence (logic). So, it is configurable either CLOSED/DRY and OPEN/WET or the other way.There are 10 (ten) valve terminals of which one (valve #10) can be configured a master valve controller. I replaced an existing 6-valve controller so that this was enough. If you need much more, an upper model has extender capability.The IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1'sdefault IP setting is DHCP, unlike cheap similar devices that have default static IP address of 192.168.x.x, so it can join your LAN without any trick. The IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 seems to employ the BonJour name service client, so you can immediately access its web interface by the default domain name of irricgationcaddy if your LAN supports BonJour. Unfortunately, my LAN does not. So, I had to discover my IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 by looking for a new DHCP client with a strange MAC address, but this is not a big deal at all.One of the excellences of the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 is that it can be programmed and controlled from a LAN client PC using a regular web browser. These days more and more gadgets like this feature and advertise they are controlled from smart phones via cloud, but I am very against this trend for several reasons.:- First, I have never wanted turning on and off my bedside lamp (or opening/closing a garage door, controlling irrigation) while riding a train, driving a car, or even while working.- Smart phone control uses proprietary app, and if the app updates do not catch up OS updates, there may be problems.- Most importantly, if the vendor goes out of business and the cloud stops working, the gadget becomes a brick. I have experienced this with Chumby (although it has resumed with a different fee-based business model). Gadgets like an irrigation controller are supposed be used for a long time; Our old controller was in use for 20 year. Hardware failure due to aging over time is unavoidable, but it's sad to dispose of a working piece of hardware due to an external service shutdown.Well, I have to confess I have difficulties in viewing smart phone's tiny screen with my aging vision, but....The IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 does provide cloud-based remote control using a regular web browser (free) as well as a smart phone app (an app costs $4.99) so that you can set up and control the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 from anywhere in the world with reasonable security control. I mostly use a local web browser even from my work place through a VPN between my house and work place. The browser-based cloud remote UI is mostly the same as the local UI.I guess the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 internally runs Linux like a number of embedded smart devices available today. One of the very initial settings was to set up the NTP server domain and time zone so that the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 would use a correct time clock. This was a bit tricky and confusing. The web UI seems to use JavaScript to display real-time clock, and it did not reflect the setting change until I hit Ctl-F5 to reload the web page. Even so, the real-time clock display updates only every 3 seconds which looks odd.Each of the 10 valves/zones can be nicknamed, but the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 accepts only Latin alpha-numerics, not even punctuations like "&," but nickname lengths are not artificially limited short. So names like "Patio and Backyard Orchards" are possible.You can set up to 3 (three) individual programs, Progarm1 through Program3, but these programs cannot be nicknamed. My impression is that these programs aim to provide different concurrent scheduling, like Program1 to irrigate every day zones A, B, and C, Program2 to irrigate zones X every other day, etc.Overall, the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 is very well priced, has everything necessary but nothing unnecessary to me, is easy to install, program and use. It is well designed as a practical set-and-forget irrigation controller, not as a techie toy.Now my wish list.Local controlI wish the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 had simple LED indicators to show which valve is currently on and a simple push button switch to manually turn on each valve in a cyclic manner. Irrigation components like hoses, tubes, nozzles, etc. do break over time and they need to be tested after repair. In such a case, I'd rather just tap on a button than log in to my PC and open a web browser. Well, I could have used a smart phone app instead of taking my laptop PC to our backyard to control the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1...Multiple programsPrograms 1 through 3 for concurrent different watering schedules may be good, but not to me. Instead , I would rather have multiple programs for different seasons, like winter, summer, spring/autumn automatically observed by the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1. Again, I'd like to emphasize the importance of the set-and-forget nature of this kind of gadgets.Precise HTTP controlThe IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 provides only interactive web UI to control. I am building a system to implement much more precise irrigation watering by collecting information from soil moisture sensors, humidity sensors, and the national weather service (NOAA, weather.gov). The IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 can disable scheduled watering using the rainsensor input, but I'd rather control individual valves because the front yard lawn and back yard vegetable boxes may have different soil moisture situations. I searched the IrrigationCaddy ICEthS1 for an open TCP port for debugging and development, but found no other ports than HTTP. So I guess the HTTP port accepts unpublished URI or protocol for more precise control.