Then this will not work for me. It is to complicated to use.
‘Complicated’ is a subjective matter. To me it’s not complicated at all, in fact, it provides flexibility to break up a long water session into multiple small sessions, like the ‘cycle and soak’ feature on some sprinkler controllers. For example, to water for one full day, you can set a station to run for 1 hour, repeat every hour, for 23 times, this covers your 1 day of water time. If you want the soil to rest a minute between two continuous sessions, you can set a station to run for 59 minutes, repeat every hour, for 23 times.
Let me re-state that the only data that we are talking about to ‘fit in 1 byte’ is the ‘per-station water time stored in EEPROM‘, in other words, the ‘programmed station water time’. Everything else, including the program’s repeat count, cycle time, and ALL run-time variables (which exist in RAM) are of full precision. The actual run-time of a station is the programmed water time adjusted by water percentage, weather, station delay time etc, and is of full precision.