dBeau
Active Member
I'd like to know the salt level at a minimum.
Monitoring the salt level is not really a problem. The only way salt leaves the pool is if you backwash, drain, or your swimmers drag it out. So long as your pool doesnt leak, the salt level will remain constant.
Sooo...is there any Chlorine Generator out there that has either (A) an RS232 interface that is easy to use to pull data from or (<_< a published RS485 protocol?
I've not seen any published RS485 protocols. However, I have looked at and wrote some software for the Intellitouch protocol. Even when nothing is happening, there is a lot of activity on the wire. I dont have a pentair salt generator but the control board I have and the pump I have simply send out their status on a regular basis. The control panels and UI devices monitor and display that. It's pretty easy to watch what happens when a button is pressed. After you get the checksum routine down and the basic packet format, it mostly makes sense. Since some of their interfaces show status from their salt generator, I'd assume that it too writes status to the wire on a regular interval.
I can easily build a PIC control unit to talk RS485 and get the data from the unit, but need to know the protocol since RS485 is a query/response mechanism. I need to know what to send to the Generator to get it to respond.
I use a Pool Pilot Total Control for my chlorine. It's a closed loop systems for both pH control and chlorine (via ORP). It mostly works great and the two line display on the unit has a lot of very useful information. However, they claim that none of this information makes it to their RS485 bus. I still plan to verify this. Conceptually, I understand how to convert the signals driving the display to serial, but actually putting the hardware together (and risking breaking the device) is a different matter.
Anyways, if you really want to monitor your pool, pH and sanitizer levels are probably the most important as they change on a day to day basis. Salt levels would be nice, but since you are going to adjust that every other week at most, looking at the display on the device will suffice.