OK, let’s think if there is a general way to accommodate the different application scenarios. To begin, here are what’s currently supported:
– Weather algorithm, which is a global setting. Currently the supported algorithms include manual, Zimmerman, the auto rain delay. Among them, we added support to adjust the weights of the three weather factors (temp, humidity, rain) of the Zimmerman algorithm. It’s certainly possible to add another weather method called ‘seasonal adjustment’ where the user can manually set the watering percentage for each month.
– The per-program ‘use weather’ flag, which controls if the watering percentage is applied to the program or not.
– The per-station ‘ignore rain’ flag, which controls if a station observe rain delay / rain sensing or not.
From what Phil describes, there seems to be additional need for either a per-program choice, or perhaps even per-station choice of weather algorithm, meaning each program (or station) can choose which weather algorithm to follow.
There is a tradeoff between making the weather support more flexible vs. making the UI clean and less confusing. So I am trying to think of the simplest way to get the majority of the needs covered here.