I had the urge to send this out a week ago, but I was holding on to it because I had to hear some feedback, suggestions, and issue reports from the initial users. Now I am ready to spread the words:
If you haven’t updated firmware before, here are the Firmware Update Instructions.
As always, the first question I need to answer is: what’s new in this version? Here is a list of highlights:
• New features:
- Custom station names: each station can have a custom name up to 12 letters long.
- Per-station master operation control: each station can individually activate the master station.
- Run-once program: similar to the manual override feature on some sprinkler timers.
- Station delay time, and master on/off adjusted time: fine tune station turn-on and turn-off time.
- Water level/percentage: globally scales water time up and down based on local weather conditions.
- Automatically reconnect: improves reliability on unreliable networks.
- Support for RTC and automatic RTC detection: keeps time running even when power or network is lost.
- Full range of time zones: living in Nepal? No problem.
• Improved features:
- Program now has an ‘enable’ flag which allows you to enable or disable each program individually.
- Improved Graphical Preview feature, which shows each station’s name and scheduled on/off time.
So this is another major upgrade since Firmware 1.6. So what happened to Firmware 1.7? Well, that was a quick update for the preparation of OpenSprinkler 1.4 orders: except for added support of RTC, it didn’t have any major changes. So I had to number this one 1.8 to distinguish it from the previous version.
Also taking a suggestion from the Forum, I’ve starting using minor revision numbers (1.8.0, 1.8.1 etc.) to keep track of changes in between major releases. This way you can easily find out whether your version is up to date.
I’ve also made a video tutorial (above) for those who want a video guide on how to use this firmware. I ended up having to switch between different ways of recording, so the audio quality is not consistent. Sorry about that, and enjoy the video!
