Remote controlled valve with flow meter.

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello guys,

I am trying to develop a remote controlled valve via LoRa with a flow meter to check if the valve has really opened.

To achieve this task I have 2 Possible boards: Either the Feather 32u4 or the MKR WAN 1300.

  • I want to couple these with 2 relays to open or close the valve.
  • I also want to couple them with this flow meter.

So far I have started with the Feather 32u4. I managed to attach 2 releay shields and open and close the valve via LoRa.

Now comes the tricky part, the power supply (I am a total noob when it comes to this):

The Valve needs 9V to operate, the Feather needs 3.7V and the Flow Meter needs 5V.
I thought of buying a 9V LiPo battery.
I know I cant plug that into the Feather so I wanted to to somehow reduce the output of that battery for the Feather so only 3.7V go into the feather. 9V should be available for the valve circuit that is controlled by the relays.

And now I am wondering if it would be better to use the MKR WAN 1300 since it has a 5V pin, that I could use for the Flow Meter. The Feather does not have that, and therefore I assume I would have to somehow supply 5V to the Flow Meter from the Battery as well, also coupled with a relay, so it does not drain power all the time.

It is important that everything runs with as little power consumption as possible!

Any advice on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

2

Add in a flow turbine to generate electric power for your setup /smile.

You didn’t specify what valves your using, most have quite a large current power draw.

3

Ok so I got the valve from a friend of mine and unfortunately I cannot find the datasheet, but on the valve it says the following:

V9 = W 3.3
Impulse

I know that it is sort of a "latching" valve, so you only have to apply current for a short amount of time to open it.
If you want to close it you reverse the direction of the current.

Also the idea with the turbine is quite genious, I could potentially recharge my battery with that and at the same time know if water is flowing, by checking if the turbine produces energy. Correct?