Make webapp more responsive?

Hoi farmbot-team,

would it be possible to make the farmbot webapp more responsive when it comes to controlling
the movement? Sometimes I’d like to fine tune farmbot’s position to match with something in reality. Thus I am using the arrows and 10 mm stepping. From one click to being ready again for the next movement it takes quite a long while. After two or three clicks I am very unpatient to keep on moving :grimacing:

Would it be possible to make this process quicker?

Cheers!

1 Like

Surely that’s possible with faster network interconnects plus WebApp + FBOS software architecture changes. ( Think multi-player networked gaming technologies,e.g. :slight_smile: )

@Klimbim That is an eventual goal, but it’s not on our calendar at the moment. I’ve very much wanted to add a real-time “jog mode” for movement-intensive operations, but the reality is it would require a large overhaul of existing code so we will probably focus on higher ROI tasks in 2021. Please keep your eyes on Github for updates as they become available.

1 Like

Could you or Rick maybe outline your ToDos for this year?

@Klimbim I can talk to Rory about it today. We do keep a public project board of our day-to-day work here. We typically review the board on Fridays, assuming we are at a good stopping point for the week.

Generally speaking, our big priorities are:

  • Stability: It’s no secret that FBOS has amassed technical debt over the last ~2 years. We’re not developing user-facing features as aggressively in years past because we want to take time to fix longstanding bugs and not grow the feature set so quickly that it adds bugs. Examples: We’ve re-written the FBOS update system, the firmware handler, and the code that talks to the message broker. We’ve also spent time increasing unit test coverage of FBOS.
  • Usability: We only have 2 developers and 4 employees total. Getting the app to a point where it is obvious to end-users (esp. non-technical / “people who aren’t power users”). Making the app more usable slows down feature development in the short term, but accelerates development in the long term. Example: I am the only FBOS developer. If I am helping customers understand the app, I am not developing FBOS. Having better tutorials, documentation, etc… frees us up to develop the product.
  • Updates to Sequences: Moving forward, we will start using Lua to extend FBOS functionality more. We want to add the ability to use non-location variables and multiple variables instead of just one. We also want to create the ability to write a Lua-based sequence and then “shrink wrap” that sequence so that it can be shared with other users (import/export). We also have gotten a lot of requests to add a “pause” button (instead of just ESTOP) to sequences.

I won’t give timelines that are more than 2 weeks out, but this is a general guide to where we are in 2021.

3 Likes

Thanks Rick, much appreciated!

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.