Soil-moisture irrigation for Rachio — now installable via HACS, works with any weather source

Hey all — if you’re running GeoDrops sensors and a Rachio controller, I’ve packaged up the soil-moisture-driven watering scheduler I’ve been running as a proper Home Assistant integration, and it’s now HACS-installable.

What it does: instead of Rachio’s fixed schedules or Flex Daily, it decides each night’s watering per zone from your GeoDrops soil-moisture readings, a drought level, and weather — then drives your Rachio zones. Cycle-and-soak, rain-skip, and per-zone runtimes are all handled.

What changed: it used to be a hand-edited pyscript app. Now you add it as a custom repository in HACS, install, and a setup wizard walks you through the bindings (Rachio device, notifications, zones, weather) — no YAML to hand-edit, and updates come through HACS like any other integration.

On weather — this is the part worth calling out: it works with any HA weather source. A local station (Tempest or similar) is preferred — it reads your yard’s own microclimate at minute resolution — but you can absolutely run it on a public weather integration (OpenWeatherMap, Pirate Weather, Met.no, etc.) at reduced accuracy. The only fields public providers tend to handle poorly are rain-in-the-last-hour and precipitation-type, which may need a small template sensor.

Prereqs: HACS, pyscript, the Rachio integration, and your GeoDrops sensors flowing into HA.

Happy to answer setup questions here.