@dun4cheap, thanks for your comments. Regarding renaming the product, I did think about it as I was indeed trying to make OpenSprinkler more general and be able to switch more devices other than sprinkler valves. If you think about, it’s fundamentally a web-connected, reasonably complex timer system. Controlling sprinkler valves is obviously one applications, but other types of appliances, and home (indoor or outdoor) lighting also often need time-based control and can certainly benefit from web-connectivity. My hesitation is that I’ve heard from many friends that it’s important to market a product with a dedicated purpose — advertise OpenSprinkler as a general-purpose control may have adverse effect. That’s why I’ve kept naming it OpenSprinkler, with extensions to other applications. Hope this makes sense.
About weather feature with a large-scale installations — one solution is to reduce the call frequency — right now the firmware is sending a query to the weather script once every 15 minutes. In practice it probably doesn’t need to be called so frequently. So reducing it to once per hour can significantly reduce the total number of quires. The other solution is to upgrade wunderground account to a paid type, which gives you a higher quota. I realize that this is a burden on the consumer, and we have been thinking about purchasing a paid account ourselves so that the consumers will not need to apply for a separate wunderground key anymore. We haven’t figured out all the details yet, especially we don’t want third parties to take advantage of our script and drain the quota. So for the time being, the above two solutions should work for large-scale installations.