December 31, 2019 Software Update

We recently deployed a new version of the web app and a new version of FarmBot OS (v9.0.0). Here’s what’s new:

Folder organization for sequences

At long last, you can now organize your sequences into folders up to three levels deep. This makes finding and editing the right sequence much easier, especially for power users with many sequences, or schools and businesses sharing one FarmBot among many users.

• Add a folder by clicking the new folder icon next to the sequence search bar.
• Change the color of a folder by clicking the folder icon.
• Open/close a folder by clicking the chevron on the left, or open/close all folders by clicking the chevron button next to the sequence search bar.
• Click the 3-dot menu shown on the right when hovering on a folder to delete the folder, edit the name, add a subfolder, or add a new sequence within the folder.
• Move sequences between folders by clicking or clicking and dragging the 3-bar menu shown on the right when hovering over the sequence.

Improvements to bulk selecting plants

After dragging out a bulk-selection box in the farm designer, you can now click individual plants in the map to add or remove them from the selection before you take an action. This makes it much faster to cherry-pick plants that don’t fall within one selection box.

Miscellaneous

• Thank you to FabioDessi on GitHub for the contribution to improve the legibility of the farm designer grid lines when zoomed far out, and for adding even heavier weight lines every 1000mm!
• Previously in Firefox, you could only drag and drop sequence commands if you specifically clicked and dragged on the command name. This has been fixed.
• A label has been added to the sensors widget to clarify that a value of 1 means the tool verification sensor did not detect a tool, and a value of 0 means that it did.
• Updated the default garden layout when creating a new account.
• Fixed a Farmware ENV bug where changing the calibration object axis to Y was resulting in an incorrect auto-sync message.
• More updates to the French translation files (thanks @Pitou for the contribution!)
• Peripherals used in a Pin Binding can no longer be deleted until the Pin Binding has been removed.

FarmBot OS v9 and a farewell

Yesterday we released FarmBot OS v9.0.0, including:

• Fixes to some Farmware bugs and the espeak feature
• Initial support for our new firmware (for the Express v1.0 and Genesis v1.5 electronics boards that feature Trinamic TMC2130 stepper drivers)

You might be thinking that that’s not much of a change to warrant a major version bump, and you would be right looking at only the source code. The real change is that our team member and the lead embedded systems engineer behind FarmBot OS, @Connor, has decided to move on from FarmBot to pursue new opportunities in his software career.

Bumping to version 9 is nothing more than a symbolic milestone of the tremendous amount of work that Connor has put into our operating system over the last few years.

I am personally very grateful to have worked with Connor since 2016, and am very proud of the contributions he’s made for FarmBot and the open-source community at-large. Best of luck in your new endeavors Connor! We’ll miss you!