April 19, 2019 Software Update

Hello FarmBot community,

On Wednesday we deployed a new version of the FarmBot web app with a ton of usability improvements and a handful of new features. Let’s take a look at what’s new:

Mobile friendly pages!

The Sequences, Regimens, and Farmware pages have all been updated to be significantly more mobile friendly. Each column from the three column layouts seen on large screens is now shown one at a time on small screens:

Sequences

Regimens

There is also a new toast notification indicating when Items have been successfully added to the Regimen.

Farmware

Farm Designer

The Farm Designer page has also been updated to improve the small screen experience. Now, the panels and/or map will always take up the full-width of the screen. Panels that require showing the map, such as the Add Plant panel, will now show the map underneath.

Style updates

  • The search fields for the Sequences and Regimens lists have been updated to match the search fields for the Plants and Events lists. (see above)
  • The large round plus buttons to add a Plant or Event are now rectangular and positioned next to the search fields, to match the layout on the Sequences and Regimens pages. (see above)
  • Sequence, Command, and Regimen titles are now left-justified. (see above)
  • Farm Events have been renamed to Events, both in the user interface and in the URL.
  • E-Stop buttons and Peripheral toggles have improved disabled styles for when the bot is offline.

E-stop%20offline

Sequence editor updates

  • The MOVE TO Command’s offset and speed fields have been moved under a “More +” dropdown.
  • Some items in Command dropdowns have been repositioned and/or their verbiage has been slightly modified.

The following Command names and input labels have been changed to be more consumer friendly:

  • MOVE ABSOLUTE -> MOVE TO
  • WRITE PIN -> CONTROL PERIPHERAL
  • READ PIN - > READ SENSOR
  • In Move Absolute Command: IMPORT COORDINATES FROM -> LOCATION
  • In Write Pin Command: PIN -> PERIPHERAL
  • In Write Pin Command: VALUE -> SET TO
  • In Read Pin Command: PIN -> SENSOR OR PERIPHERAL
  • In Write/Read Pin Commands: PIN MODE -> MODE

We’ve removed the following default Command values. You must now make an explicit choice for each of these inputs, and the sequence will not be save-able until you do.

  • LOCATION in the MOVE TO command
  • PERIPHERAL in the CONTROL PERIPHERAL command (previously PIN )
  • SENSOR OR PERIPHERAL in the READ SENSOR command (previously PIN)

New Message Center

We’ve added a whole new page to the app called the Message Center . Here you’ll find important information about your account, your FarmBot, and news such as new feature announcements. We’ll also be using this feature to help new users finish setting up their accounts and becoming acquainted with the app. Look for the blue badge in the main nav menu to see when new messages are available.

As part of this change, we moved the link to the Logs page to the Account menu on the right side of the main nav.

Relocated connectivity widget

The connectivity widget has been moved from the Device page to the main navigation, allowing you to access this information quickly from anywhere in the app.

Settings

There are two new app settings available on the Account Settings page:

  1. USE 24-HOUR TIME FORMAT - This will display some times, such as the time when a log was generated, using the 24-hour time format.
  2. CONFIRM EMERGENCY UNLOCK - Use this to disable the Emergency Unlock confirmation dialogs. Thank you @farmer for the feature request.

When AUTOSYNC is turned on, the Sync button will now be styled as italicized text. Additionally, the AUTOYSNC setting will now default to ON for new accounts in an effort to make the FarmBot experience more streamlined and automatic.

We added a new gear icon menu to the Sequence Editor. In this menu you’ll find the CONFIRM STEP DELETION setting (which was previously in the Account Settings page) as well as a new setting to SHOW PINS . This can be used to show/hide the raw pin options in the Control Peripheral and Read Sensor commands. The setting will be disabled by default on new accounts in an effort to slowly make the app more consumerized and easy to use.

Sequence%20Settings

There are three new fields for setting the number of MICROSTEPS PER STEP that your stepper drivers are configured to for each axis. With this change, the following parameters are now calculated based on the MICROSTEPS PER STEP and STEPS PER MM values, and now displayed in millimeters instead of steps:

  • AXIS LENGTH
  • MAX SPEED
  • MIN SPEED
  • ACCELERATE FOR

And these parameters are now calculated based on the MICROSTEPS PER STEP value:

  • MAX MISSED STEPS
  • ENCODER MISSED STEP DECAY
  • ENCODER SCALING

There is now an additional toggle to ROTATE the map in the Farm Designer map menu. Note that this is linked to the “Swap jog buttons (and rotate map)” toggle in the move widget settings menu.

Rotate%20Map

Hardware settings tooltips now display default values in case you want to revert just some values to their defaults without needing to refer to the docs.

The device TIMEZONE will now be automatically set based on the user’s browser location when they login to a new account for the first time.

The Home Button behaviour in the Move Widget will now default to finding home on new accounts. The toggle to switch between finding home and going to home is still in the move widget’s settings menu.

Bug fixes and under-the-hood changes

  • We fixed a bug where password reset links were not functioning correctly. Thanks to Br3nda for reporting this on GitHub.
  • We fixed a bug where new accounts were not displaying the v1.4 firmware as an option in the firmware dropdown.
  • Whenever we deploy a new version of the web app now, all active browser sessions will receive a notification that they should refresh the page.
  • The alignment of the sensor readings widget's columns has been fixed for some screen sizes.
  • We improved the display of the settings menu and surrounding elements on the Logs page when viewed on small screens.
  • Spacing between fields and labels has been improved and made more consistent throughout the app.
  • We’ve applied a number of security and dependency updates to our application, as well as OpenFarm.cc
  • We’re now using a newer version of the message broker.
  • Internationalization was fixed around March 1st after a dependency update broke some functionality.

New videos and docs coming soon

This week we filmed a new software video series that explains all aspects of how to use the software as it stands today, and how things will work when the variables feature launches soon. The videos are now in the editing room of our videographer, and we expect to upload them to our YouTube channel and the software docs with the release of FBOS v8. You can also expect a big refresh of the software docs with v8.

That’s it for software, but while we’re here, let’s talk about what else we’ve been up to.

Hardware

As you may have seen from our blog or email newsletter, we recently sold out of Genesis XL v1.4 kits, and have started accepting pre-orders for Genesis XL v1.5!

There are now about 200 v1.4 XL bots out in the wild, which brings the total number of FarmBot kits we’ve shipped to customers to over 1,000! Here is an updated world map showing where all of our customers are. We’ll have this live on our website soon, and you’ll be able to mouse-over each dot to see the city name.

Welcome aboard, Marc!

This month we welcomed @Marc onto our team to help with forum moderation, customer support over email, social media management, and more.

Every Plant, Ever

Last month, in celebration of the Spring Equinox, our talented designer Claire Dierksen (maker of all the plant icons you see in the FarmBot web app) teamed up with Apple Design Award winning developer Ryan McLeod to launch Every Plant, Ever , a sticker pack for iOS! Finally, you can share the plant cuteness with all your friends. Download the pack.

From the design team:

Do you lay awake at night, racked with anxiety that, someday, you will need to convey a very specific message to someone by using a very specific combination of plant emojis, but the current finite selection of plant emojis won’t be able to communicate the full emotional gravity of said message?

Fear not, the Every Plant Ever sticker pack is here to fill the hole in your life left by your parents inability to show affection in any way other than buying you stuff, like these stickers (which, at some point in the future, might consist of every plant in existence).

So far there are 59 peppers, 15 mushrooms, 29 herbs, 60 fruits, and 90 veggies, with more being added monthly. And all of these plants are also available in the FarmBot web app’s farm designer.

3 Likes

Really, really, really like!
Thank you to everyone at Farmbot!

But…

The cynic in me thinks this may be some grand scheme to have the robots take over the world - one 1.5m x 3m or 3m x6m plot at a time!

1 Like

Many good ideas are implemented in this release. Especially mobile experience is much much better now, good work guys!

On an iPhone I am not able to scroll through the menu on the left with Safari… just commenting on the mobile “workability” not even friendlyness :wink:

Any idea when that will be released?

@roryaronson? @Gabriel?

We’re thinking FBOS v8 will be ready in the next 2-3 months.

Oh, and in terms of the iPhone/safari scrolling, thanks for letting us know. Can you specify exactly which menu you can’t scroll through? The Plants list? Sequences list? etc

We usually only test against the Chrome browser on desktop and Android because Chrome is generally the best at adhering to web standards and implementing new features quickly. Also, none of us have iPhones :smile: Though this is a place we can improve (cross-browser, cross-device compatibility)

1 Like

I cannot close the menu list once opened, I need to click on a different menu item. The browser version does not depend on the farmbot os version that is installed on the bot, right?

Hey, uhhh. Don’t want to bother you or anything, but that small update on the sequence editor where you moved the Move To command’s offset under the more drop down is quite inconvenient for me. It became just one more step I have to take to see the offsets which I use heavily in my sequences. Maybe add an option to permanently show or hide the offsets. Thank you for your consideration!

2 Likes

There is also this thing which is blocking my way of creating new pin bindings. I can get around it by slowly moving the scroll bar on the right but just wanted to let you know if you didn’t already.

Looks like this is caused by lower display resolutions. 1080p is working great for me, but having the ability to turn the function on/off would be great for users running lower resolutions. :+1:

Also i’ve noticed that this function is not available in the Regimens tab … Was that made by intention?

1 Like

I had to change the Z value for all 310 of my plants in order to have my watering sequence do so from a lower height.
I was very painful…
Each move to had to be amended, and this meant:
Open “Move To plant” sequence
Expand “More”
Enter Z offset
Save

Not that it would have made a huge difference, but it would have been one step less…

It might be nice to have a “Save All Unsaved Sequences” option…