December 19, 2018 Software Update

Hi FarmBot community,

This week we deployed new features to the FarmBot web app at my.farm.bot and also released v6.4.12 of FarmBot OS. In this update you’ll find a lot of small improvements that add up to a more consistent and streamlined experience, as well as some under-the-hood changes that improve performance. Let’s get started:

 

Firmware

Bundled with the latest FarmBot OS comes a new version of the firmware which reports position updates at a faster rate when using the v1.4 Farmduino electronics board. This results in real-time updating of scaled and raw encoder coordinates in the Controls widget as well as smoother updating of the virtual FarmBot in the farm designer. This change does not apply to v1.2 and v1.3 electronics boards because they do not feature the STM32 encoder co-processor like the v1.4 board.

Events

We have added a search box to the top of the Events panel allowing you to quickly find scheduled Events by the name of the Sequence or Regimen that will be run. Additionally, the calendar icon next to the search field can be clicked to scroll the Events list back to the current date.

 

Empty State Graphics

- There are now empty state graphics and help text on the Plants and Events panels when no Plants or Events have been added. This helps guide new users of the app to begin using these panels.

- The empty state graphics and help text on the Sequences and Regimens pages have also been updated to match.

 

Crop Search

- When navigating to the crop search panel, your cursor will now automatically be focused in the search field. This streamlines the workflow for adding plants to your garden by reducing the number of clicks required.
- We’ve also added two graphics to the crop search panel. The first graphic prompts users to perform a search. The second graphic is shown while a search is in progress (before any results have been loaded), when the search term returns no results, and when loading crop details. When modifying a search term, there is now a loading icon in the search box indicating the status of the search.

 

Farm Designer

- From the main farm designer view, you can now box-select multiple plants. Clicking on empty soil will clear the selection.



- Previously, when adding a plant to the map, there was a small delay between unclicking the mouse and when the plant icon would appear. This delay has been eliminated.
- A flicker artifact when selecting/deselecting a plant in the map with the spread layer enabled has been removed.

 

Bug fixes

- We fixed an issue where the frontend would wrongly show that the bot was still syncing in cases where the user switched browser tabs during a sync.
- We fixed an issue where saving a Sequence in one browser tab would cause that Sequence to be loaded into the editor in other browser tabs. This may have caused a poor experience in cases where multiple people were creating Sequences on the same account at the same time.

 

Infrastructural changes

- The web app is now ran using docker containers, which facilitates 3rd party developer set up and running the app on private servers.
- The API now better supports batch update operations. This is crucial for realizing good performance and a smooth experience for use cases such as creating or deleting many plants at once.

 

Other

- The login/create account page has been updated with new graphics to better represent the app’s current form.


- The Regimens page layout has been changed to match the layout of the Sequences page on large screens for visual consistency when navigating between those two pages.
- Deleting a Sequence or Regimen now removes the slug from the URL.
- Determining if a resource (such as a Sequence) is in-use is now performed in the browser instead of on our servers, resulting in the in-use indicator icons updating immediately.
- We applied a host of security patches and updated dependencies, which you can refer to the GitHub commit history to see the details of.

 

Documentation

In addition to our software deployments, we have also made substantial additions to our documentation.

- If you’re a developer, make sure to check out our [developer-specific documentation hub](http://developer.farm.bot) to learn about the inner workings of FarmBot, and sign up for our [developer-specific newsletter](http://eepurl.com/dJ4P86).
- If you’re interested in the inner workings of our business itself, check out our newly launched public beta of [meta.farm.bot](http://meta.farm.bot).