Probably a simple question, but I am unsure where to begin. I have a new Genesis XL and I put in actual plants. I used FarmBot to move to the actual location and use the current location to make the plant. When I run a sequence, I notice that the bot in some cases moves in a jumbled order. It will do first two plants on the left, skip the middle 2 and then go to the last 2 in the same row before it comes back. Is there a way to fix this so it moves optimally and takes the shortest path?
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You can optimize travel distance by clicking different “sort order” options when creating a group.
As you can see in the image above, the app exposes a bar diagram. The shorter the bar, the less distance FarmBot must travel. You can minimize travel distance by clicking the sort option that has the shortest travel distance.
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That’s awesome, thanks for the quick response. Couple more questions:
- Is there anything I would do to optimize between groups as I am trying to make each row a group.
- Is there any reason that they are random in order? How does the ordering get set? – Wonder if this is due to the fact that it was not placed in a perfect line.
@happyfarmer The easiest thing to do would be to adjust them so that they are in more of a straight line (even if they are not perfectly lined up in real life). A future version will offer an “optimal” sort option that will account for these issues, but we have not started work on that feature yet.
You can also turn rows in to groups by creating a “zone”.
Click “EDIT IN MAP” and then draw a square in the garden. All items inside the square will become a part of the group, even when the contents of the square changes.
Thanks for the help. I will give this a try. On a side note I realized and found something weird. I suddenly see a lot of new plants that did not exist before in the farm designer. It manually grouped them as beets and spinach. I deleted them but the plants still exist. I have tried to select them and manually delete them to no avail.
Question: Did an update push someone else’s config on to mine? Or is it sensing weeds and calling them as plants? Note - other than the watering component nothing else is on the bot and I am yet to make anything else work.
Thanks for your inputs.
@rickcarlino It might be useful to allow for a User Selected Order of the plant groups. (Manually clicking each item in the order you’d like FB to travel - or display as a list and drag and drop to re-order.) If you knew you were going to always run the same groups immediately after each other, you could order the plants where they made sense in travel time. In our experience running large Gerber Multi and Single Ply Cutters, a well-trained human almost always beats AI. Just a thought 
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@happyfarmer I took a look at your account. My suspicion is that this is a side effect of the new MARK AS step- have you run it recently? Also, could you please provide me with the IDs of the unexpected plants? You can find a plants ID by clicking it on the map and looking at the URL bar of your browser (screenshot attached)
@RickCarlino - I did updates yesterday to try and group the plants as you suggested using a group by drawing an area. I updated 2 pieces right around row 2 where we see some of the additions of Spinach on the left and beets in a single row. I marked the additions in a red outline.
Would agree. It will be nice to specify the direction if possible as I could not get it to go linear even after using the area boundaries.
@happyfarmer We have a feature that populates a new user account with fake data to help beginners learn how to use the app. The data looks exactly like the data you have shown. This leads me to believe you may have accidentally used this feature.
In the “MESSAGES” tab of the app, there would have been a message that asks you to select a device. When you select a device model, the app populates itself with plants, tools and sequences, etc…
Thanks @RickCarlino. That does make sense. I was clearing the messages to remove the alerts and may have done just what you mentioned. With that said, is there a way to clear that from the list of plants? Delete on each does not seem to work.