November 18, 2022 Software Update

today we’ve got another web app and FarmBot OS update for you. Here’s what’s new:

FarmBot trail in profile viewer

The FarmBot trail (path of where it has recently travelled) has been added to the profile viewer, giving you one more piece of visual information to help keep track of how your FarmBot is moving throughout the bed, particularly in the Z direction. To view, make sure to turn on TRAIL in the FARMBOT map layer.

New Lua helpers

We’ve added five new helper functions to the Lua environment to aid in writing custom code for your FarmBot quickly and conveniently:

• on(pin) sets the state of the given pin to digital 1.
• off(pin) sets the state of the given pin to digital 0.
• debug(message) sends a log with type debug.
• toast(message, type?) sends a message as a log and a toast notification. Defaults to type info if no type is given.
• move{args} moves to an absolute coordinate position, where all arguments are optional. When an x, y, or z coordinate is omitted, the current position along that axis will be maintained. This helper is essentially a character saving version of move_absolute.

You can find additional information and example code for all of these new helpers in our developer documentation, which we recently updated with better organization to accommodate the expanded Lua library.

Plant depth

A new DEPTH field has been added to all plants, representing the depth at which the seed should be sowed in the soil for optimal germination. Currently this value can be accessed via Lua, and we intend to release a featured sequence soon that will make use of the value for non-developers to take advantage of it.

Additionally, a new setting is available in the plants panel for DEFAULT PLANT DEPTH, which is used as the default depth value for all new plants.

Miscellaneous

• Improved the styling of dropdown menus and input fields throughout the app to provide a more consistent visual style.
• Fixed an issue where the soft_stop() firmware function would not prevent movement retries from occurring.
• Fixed an issue where the soft_stop() firmware function would prevent future commands from executing.
• Fixed an issue where the metric history plot for demo accounts was showing incorrectly.
• Increased the life of support tokens to 1 week.