Does your valve had a stereo headphone type plug? Might be worth

Comment on Vigoro 3015V Sprinkler Timer Internals and Valve Design by JonC.

Does your valve had a stereo headphone type plug? Might be worth cracking the case open (some are glued, some are just snapped together) to get a better idea of how it works.

I just spent about 45 minutes pulling apart my system to figure it out. With the system I have, the valves have a gray angular body with a water inlet and outlet. A wire comes from the valve and terminates in an oval shaped end with two pin sockets which connects to the box.

The Orbit sprinkler box I have is powered by two 1.5 volt batteries, but internally it has a boost converter which charges a 2200uF/25 volt capacitor to well higher than 3 volts (closer to 12 volts). When you turn the valve on with the control unit, there is a several second delay which is used to charge a capacitor in the control box. This is then switched with a transistor through the solenoid in the valve. When you cancel the program, there is again another few second delay where the capacitor charges, and the transistors switch again, turning the valve off.

I would recommend using higher voltages and see if that works for you. You may be able to turn on with a lower voltage, due to the pressure from the water in the line providing some assistance, but not have enough power at 3 volts to force the valve closed against the water pressure. I used a 12 volt power source to successfully open and close the valve repeatedly.

The coil in the solenoid provides quite a bit of kickback voltage when the magnetic field collapses, which will quite likely damage a micro-controller, because you need to trigger it forwards and backwards you can’t use a blocking diode so you’ll need to come up with a creative way to keep the HV spike from getting to the micro-controller. This is also a common problem with relays and micro-controllers. In their circuit it takes 4 transistors, two on each lead, to provide polarity switching on their valve.

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