u/Prestigious-Newt-110

Hired someone to do this concrete work, paid half up front and they took off leaving a mess and are nowhere to be found. I had to remove the framing wood myself and I’ve been drenching it several times a day for 5 days. My gardener said I need to cut it or it’s going to crack so I called a few places. One said it’s pointless to cut it since it’s been 5 days since being poured and whatever cracks are going to develop are already in motion. Another guy said $500 to cut it which he admitted was high. The area with the blue bin on it is 5.5’ x 10’. The other side is 4.5’x12’.

What’s the consensus?

Had to come up with a project for my DC Electronics course so I decided to replace my outdated sprinkler controller. Used an ESP32-S3 44 pin on an expansion board with a DS3231 RTC, 6 relay module, and touchscreen for the UI. Syncs via WiFi for time/date but uses the DS3231 to keep time if WiFi is down for some reason. I considered adding a moisture sensor but instead I have the unit accessing OpenWeather API to check and pause/resume based on rain in the forecast. I also added a pause function for when my gardener tells me to turn off the water for 3 or 5 days after applying weed killer - set it and it resumes automatically after the timer is up so I don’t have to remember to turn it back on. Also connected it to Arduino Cloud to control the sprinklers manually from my phone when performing maintenance on broken sprinkler heads and PVC pipe. LEDs on the front panel let me know if the system is scheduled to run (or paused if the LED is off) and if the system is actively watering with the blue LED. Lots of hot glue used to hold it together. For the presentation I had it illuminate and animate LED strips using NeoPixel to simulate sprinklers and then after I connected the data wires to the relays. I did what I could with the coding and had Claude assist with the rest. Works great!