All valves engaged on boot

[Dan in CA]

That is a leftover print statement.
There was another bug that prevented any station name changes from showing up in the log until after a restart.

@scottsh, The point was that having a blank station name could cause the entire program to stop working under certain conditions. Even the most obscure bugs are worth fixing.

Dan

[scottsh]

I wasn’t arguing the bug fix, but the overall concept of having blank station names. I’m thinking it might mess up some UI to have blank names, or make it hard to read. If there is a case for blank names, I was thinking the UIs should do something to handle that (like use a light gray color ‘none’ for the name maybe.)

One thing I noticed was that station names can’t contain commas (because the names are written out as a CSV and any commas aren’t quoted.) If you do, certain UI things like the log display don’t handle that right. Do we want to modify the code to allow commas in the names or should we prevent commas during input validation? Right now I’m assuming no commas in my plugin but I can change that.

[Dan in CA]

I am thinking about changing the snames.txt file to json format. That should allow more free form names.

It’s just a matter of having the time.

Dan

[mstormo]

@Dan in CA wrote:

@scottsh, The point was that having a blank station name could cause the entire program to stop working under certain conditions. Even the most obscure bugs are worth fixing.

Not so obscure really, I was using the sprinkler_pi application which was on the pre-configured SD card. It had zone 1 hardcoded to Master Valve, and since I didn’t need any master valve, I simply used zones 2-8. So, when I moved to your application, I didn’t bother to move all the terminals, but just removed the Zone 1 name, to make it a little cleaner to look at, instead of S1 or “Master Valve”. 🙂

But I guess this segways over to scottsh’s original question, should the UI be tweaked to allow for showing less zones than bulks of 8 per expansion board?

Personally, if I had the opportunity to enable/disable zones in the UI so the disabled ones wouldn’t show, I would probably do that, to keep things as clean as possible. I do the same with the home automation system. It has a ton of possible options, but I only show what use the most, and which makes it easier for the wifey. Happy wife, happy life..

[mstormo]

@Dan in CA wrote:

I am thinking about changing the snames.txt file to json format. That should allow more free form names.

Right, and probably better overall design, since you can parse those directly without any regexp magic.
However, scottsh was referring to the log file, which is in CSV format. Even with snames.txt in json format, you still have that problem, unless you just say the log file isn’t CSV but just plain text..

[Dan in CA]

@scottsh,
I misread your post about commas in station names.
The reason for storing the log data in a csv file is to allow for easy download and import into a spreadsheet for analysis and long term record keeping as documented on the wiki.
http://rayshobby.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Python_Interval_Program_for_OSPi#Archiving_log_data:

@mstormo,
I didn’t intend to imply that the bug you found was obscure, only that even obscure bugs are worth fixing.

Regarding the matter of hiding unused zones in the UI, I think that is definitely a useful feature. In fact Johathan Marsh already implemented it in an early version of his improved UI.
[attachment=0:m1xyl1gb]Zone-connected.jpg[/attachment:m1xyl1gb]

However I don’t see in his latest rev which is now in beta as described in this post:
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=499

I’m a little hesitant to make any major changes to the current UI until we see how his UI develops. That’s why I have been concentrating on the plugin system and bug fixes in the core program.

Dan

[mstormo]

@Dan in CA wrote:

@mstormo, I didn’t intend to imply that the bug you found was obscure, only that even obscure bugs are worth fixing.

Heh no worries, even I felt it looked a bit obscure (who sets an empty string in a name field anyways?! I do, apparently), which is why I thought it would be good to just explain how I got there.

@Dan in CA wrote:

I’m a little hesitant to make any major changes to the current UI until we see how his UI develops. That’s why I have been concentrating on the plugin system and bug fixes in the core program.

I think that’s a wise choice. Let’s get both branches stabilized and merged first.

Btw, idea for a simple plugin: Temperature threshold. Once temperature hits a certain low, disable all zones. (Maybe simply overriding the current watering level to 0%?)

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