I appreciate that Ray, I manage a large (very large HOA) that has over 50 irrigation controllers with an avg of 18+ stations along with common area lights which currently run off analog timers which I have to have my crew manually adjust them every month to compensate for the dusk to dawn times, and so on. (These are spread out over 69 acres and each one are in a locked meter room which means a lot of labor time to accomplish an easy task.
When I originally came across your controller and realized its capabilities, I began writing a control center for windows to manage these controllers with the intent on controlling every aspect from irrigation and light controller. Along with this I have began installing a wireless mesh with ubiquity radios, and installing IP Cams as well. All is coming along including your controllers. However with the changes that you have made your great firmware upgrades, I stopped developing my windows control center for them for now, because you guys were going in the right direction for full automation. (And you still are)
I am not sure you need to adjust your programming much, I just need them to start at dusk which is now available, the program can dynamically change the run time for the light station automatically by calculate how many minutes it needs to stay on by comparing it to how many minutes there is from the current dusk to dawn times each time it runs. So a few lines of code will suffice. Keep in mind I am using the same controller for irrigation and lights and in the future maybe for more applications. This was made possible when the feature to run multiple programs and stations simultaneously by option was added a few months ago.
With the new firmware release you mention making some upgrades and changes with V 3.0 hardware, I think you are continuing to go in the right direction with some great features. My crew already uses an android app I wrote for them to assist with logging stations, sprinkler types, gps locations and other features for our controllers to make it easier to mange them. I hope maybe, just maybe in the future information like this can be stored on the controller which with the addition to memory I think it will be. One of the other big things would be being able to upgrade the firmware remotely and retain the settings. But all in good time I am sure.
You may in the future also want to consider renaming your product slightly. Opensprinkler to many of my colleagues and customers means nothing more than an irrigation controller. It is much more.
Lastly, I don’t know if you considered that someone would consider using your device in such a large scale (50 Devices or so), but you maybe surprised that I am sure there are some others. I do see a minor problem in the future for someone like me with using the weather reports. If I have 50 devices looking for weather reports I will exceed my max real quick without having to change my plan with weather bucket. I could understand this if I was pulling weather from different areas but i am not. Maybe one device or the controllers could be redirected to check my server and I could have my server check it for all. I have not looked in to this yet as it has not come to play yet, but it will. I am pretty sure it will effect others as well.
Thanks for your time,
Ed