Gary Solomon - Retired I.
I purchased the Rain Bird ESP-tm2 for its remote control capability
I purchased the Rain Bird ESP-tm2 for the brand name and also and primarily because I wanted to control my system from my phone from anywhere, which comes in handy with spot watering areas in a little more need. The wireless capability is a slow 2.4Gb IoT wifi connection. And yet the app tries to constantly communicate with the controller proving very 'taxing on the this user's experience. It is constantly attempting communications with the controller. The app is constantly polling the irrigation controller for primarily updates for whichever zone was currently in operation in order to update the time remaining for that zone in the app. The app is trying to constantly update the user by asking the controller to update it so it can update the user display. This sort of polling 'architecture' purportedly went extinct nearly 30 years ago, but now apparently it has made a comeback like the measles. Anybody out there,... please design a better app and sell it to Rain Bird? To fix this problem is dead simple and wouldn't require any Rain Bird hardware modification. The controller works with a set of timers to use for programmed watering times, right. So what is so Einsteinian about starting both the actual zone timer at the irrigation controller, while at the same time starting a software timer kept by the app locally. You don't need to throw a monkey wrench into the system with unnecessary traffic oversubscribing an underperforming low priority wifi interface. Just start a second software timer to shadow the actual timer that the irrigation controller controls locally. All this data traffic requesting updates from the controller for a given zone timers value, all going over an interface which is intended for low bit rate, latency tolerant data transfer very quickly destroys the user experience. So what happen with 2 timers when say a zone ends abruptly due to some issue of functional error? The Irrigation Controller is capable of reporting an error notification to the app which would then be able to update the user and take appropriate action. A very poorly conceived of app. It reminds me of a debate years ago in Congress over all of the $millions being spent by the US to develop a pen that can write in zero G, (while in space). Yes, well one of the congressmen said he had it on very good authority that the Russians had a different solution and held up a pencil.