September 22, 2021 Software Update

This morning we deployed a new version of the web app as well as FBOS v14.4.0. Here’s what’s new:

New Lua helpers

We added the following Lua helpers as a public beta, and we look forward to hearing any feedback on them. Please be advised they are subject to change.

• take_photo_raw() takes a photo and returns the binary representation of the image so that you can upload it to a 3rd party API (example) or your own server (example 1).
• Base64 support in Lua with base64.encode() and base64.decode(). Documentation coming soon, but the API is similar to the JSON API.
• Ability to get the device’s auth token via the auth_token() helper. Please use this instead of storing account passwords in Lua code. This makes it possible to easily modify API resources from Lua.

FarmBot location settings

You can now specify FarmBot’s LOCATION in the world with latitude and longitude coordinates. This information may be used by advanced sequence commands to provide smarter FarmBot operation, such as a watering command that uses local weather data.

To set the location, press the blue cross-hairs button and grant your web browser permission to provide location information to the web app. This will automatically set the coordinates using two decimal precision (neighborhood level). If you would like to provide more or less precision, you may edit the coordinates manually. Clicking the folded map icon will open openstreetmap.org to the current coordinates so that you may double check accuracy.

You may also specify if your FarmBot is located INDOORS. This information may be used by advanced sequence commands to provide smarter FarmBot operation based on an indoor vs outdoor environment.

New map photo filters

Three new map photo filters allow you to control whether or not calibration, weed detection, or soil height images are shown in the map.

Miscellaneous

• The status ticker will now show the date and time that FarmBot was last seen whenever it is displaying the “FarmBot is offline” message.
• Fixed a bug with Pin Bindings for the Reboot action.
• Fixed system crash when taking > 1,000 photos in a single boot. Thank you to our industrial and scientific users for helping to troubleshoot this one!
• Increased the timeout for http() requests in Lua.
• Fixed Lua json.decode() issue where decoding a top level array would raise an exception.
• Upgraded the Nerves system, Erlang, Elixir, and OTP.
• Replaced a C NIF for calendar generation to simplify the build process.
• Improved validation of event executable IDs.
• Deprecated the v13 software and developer documentation.

Coming soon

As previously mentioned, we are working towards two major new features: multi-variable sequences and publicly shared sequences. Stay tuned for these big announcements coming soon.