1. IT BEGINS WITH ARGUS Argus has irrigation software where you can set up recipes for misting or watering. Each recipe pulls sensor information from a sensor or group of sensors in an environmental zone, does some math and then decides to water. The way it sends the message to w ater is by triggering a 24 volt signal on a specific relay output on a D8. In the old days the D8 output would open a 24v solenoid valve directly connected to the relay . Now we have the Boom Spooler. To the Argus, the Boom Spooler looks like 16 solenoid v alves controlling 16 mist/irrigation zones. It’s a good idea to keep things simple and use (2) dedicated D8s in your Argus. Wire the outputs from the first D8 into Spooler inputs 1 - 8 , matching output - to - input , and the outputs from the second D8 into input s 9 - 16. When an Argus recipe triggers the 1 st output of the 1 st D8, which is wired into Spooler input #1 , the spooler does its magic and broadcasts a command to all the booms to water crop 01. Trigger the 2 nd output of the 1 st D8, wired to the Spooler inpu t #2, and the spooler broadcasts a command to all booms to water crop 02, and so forth. Here’s exactly how that works: There are 16 inputs on the spooler. There are 16 possible crops in each boom. When Spooler input # 5 , for instance, is energized, the spo oler sends out a message to all booms to water crop 05 . Any booms that have a n active crop 5 (zones, valves, & passes defined) , water it. Any booms which don’t have a crop 5 (maybe they have only 4 crops total) or have an inactive crop 05 (zones, valves, o r passes not defined) don’t water. So how do you use this practically? There are two considera tions: Fir st, all booms networked to a given spooler basically share the same pool of 16 crops. See, all crop 01s tend to be watered in roughly the same way (o r at least at the same time). So you don’t want to have one boom with crop 01 = cacti and another with crop 01 = petunias. The same goes for crops 02 - 16 . You need to make sure that you either keep the same plants in the same crops across all booms (i.e. cr op 01 = petunias everywhere), or divvy up the crops between different booms (i.e. boom 1 has crops 1 - 4, boom 2 has crops 5 - 8, and boom 3 has crops 9 - 16, etc.). You do this by making boom 1 have 4 total crops, all active, boom 2, 8 crops with only crops 5 - 8 active , and boom 3, 16 crops with crops 9 - 16 active . Second, how do you deal with different environmental zones? Say Zone A is drier then Zone B. Then if the spooler uses sensors in Zone A to water crop 01 everywhere, then booms in Zone B might water thei r crop 01s too often. You’ll need to divvy up the crops between the environmental zones. So booms in Zone A might have only 8 crops (crops 1 - 8); and booms in Zone B might share (or divvy up) the remaining 8 crops (9 - 16).