Mobile Web App with Screenshots (Updated)

[COsgood]

native app on HTC Android looks exactly the same as on my laptop. All stations, all functions.

When I browse to rayshobby.net/apps/sprinklers on my laptop, it looks good (except it shows only 8 stations even though I have an expansion board)
When I browse to this URl on my HTC Android, nothing displays (I see a round loading icon which never goes away)

[icebrian]

Hello there,

Have just recently received my OSPi. Congratulations to all involved on a fantastic product!

In regards to the Webapp, are you thinking of further developing it? Not that I feel it is insufficient, quite the contrary, it is absolutely fantastic, congratulations.

If however you might be considering other features would like to contribute my humble opinion:

1. Location weather. I had intially a very hard time setting up the weather display on the WebApp. I kept seeing screenshots with the weather report but for me nothing showed up. I only later realized I had to place something in Location but even then I got it wrong as aparently my location wasn’t found. May-be in this respects I would recomend having some sort of tooltips with example on what each setting is.

2. Translations. I looked at the code and noticed no internationalization possibility was being given. Now I am not sugesting you translate but possibly give users the option of creating a language file and translating themselves (I am Portuguese btw would be happy to provide a Portuguese translation file).

3. Weather report. Would it be possible to get say a 7 day weather report. May-be providing a link on the weather icon that would open a 7-day weather report?

4. Weather report + Automatic rain delay. It might just be me but I somehow find it hard to get a quick overview on what is happening with the weather report and the automatic delays. I think it could be usefull if we had a status/overview page on this respects. Say in the 7-day weather report page also include information on the percipitation forcast and what that is going to mean to the programs after applying the rain delay. Possibly even giving the user override ability for specific days.

5. Zone configuration. Currently when we add more zone expansion boards the number of station increases by 8. If you don’t have many sprinklers this is fine, but it starts to become dificult to manage when you have say 5 expansion board totalling 40 stations. It would be great to be able to create zones and then place the sation within the zones. When navigating to for example the manual control, stations would be separated by zones.

Well I think this is everything for now. Also I just realized that possibly some of these features are dependent on the interval program. If necessary I can post these suggestions somewhere more apropriate.

Once again many thanks for your work! This is a great application, looks great, works great, easy to use, fantastic!

Sincerely

[djagerif]

I also like the idea to localise the Mobile APP and even the Micro and OSPi versions – we now have a SD card to store all this information. Perhaps go a step further and provide not just language but also time/date format changes as per country. What I’ve done is to hardcode our preferences like DD/MM and also time format with a flashing ‘:’ to indicate a ‘heartbeat’.

Ingo

[Samer]

I have been keeping up with this forum and want to let people know I haven’t abandoned this project. However, my time is severely constrained with work and research that not much time is left for other projects.

If anyone has the skill to continue development please feel free to fork the code, make changes and send back a pull request. I am more than willing to work with anyone trying to contribute to this project.

Thank you for your understanding and I hope to incorporate some of the suggestions by a future date.

Thank you!

[Michael]

Hi Samer..

I know your busy.. quick petty question. I am kind of a jQuery Noob. Any reason some of the css and js files are hosted on cloudflare (and in the case of the fonts, on the googleapi server) and others are locally installed on the local web server? It appears to make it necessary to have an internet connection?

[Michael]

Ok so far I copied the .js and .css files over into the css and js directory and updated index.php so they run local. Now the system works without internet access.

I also commented out the part about the google fonts. I don’t seem to need it?

[iDoug]

Hello Michael,

Won’t you need the Internet to set the time and weather?

Granted setting the time should be a rare occurrence but the weather should be daily or hourly. I see these as two of the biggest advantages of OpenSprinkler over other systems. One advantage (or possible disadvantage) with the files being on the Internet would be to receive updated versions.

Is there another reason these files need to be local?

[Michael]

Yes Doug… but the way the program is setup now it wont work at all without the internet, you won’t even be able to use it in manual mode. The system will still run but you wont’ be able to use the mobile app. I also don’t see any reason to have the js and css files (unless I am missing something) hosted on the internet at various sites when they can be local for better performance.

So far I took Samer’s suggestion and created a fork on github with the proposed changes and sent him a proposal.

Now when there is no internet connection, the app still works and just does not give you the weather window but you can still control your system. It also will not load css and java script files from the internet when you launch it.

Samer.. can you take a look at github?

Thanks!

[Samer]

The Google fonts are used for the flat theme, I believe. Also, the speed gain from using a CDN on a mobile device over a mobile network is tremendous. The Arduino web server is absolutely bare bones with no caching logic. Google’s servers manage this load a lot better. Also, multiple mobile apps might share the same CDN link as a result no download is ever done for the largest files of this mobile app. The app will almost always be accessed with the internet active. Even if you don’t have internet, so long you visit the mobile app once with internet, it will work.

If I am saying something that is incorrect please let me know. Also, show me some speed tests/benchmarks please. Everything I have read/seen suggests large libraries like these should always be on CDN.

[opensprinkleruser]

The GUI looks great, I can’t wait to try this out. A couple questions –

1. Any reason why you wouldn’t want to publish this in the Google Play store as a downloadable?
2. Can you think of any reasons this wouldn’t work over a WAN? e.g. if I hosted the files on a VPS?

[Samer]

@opensprinkleruser thank you. The app isn’t downloadable off the App Store because it is a webapp.

Also. It should work over a WAN without a problem.

[Samer]

By the way, earlier I said Arduino but that didn’t really make any sense. My app isn’t hosted on the microcontroller version. Anyhow, I have merged your changes except for the index.php. I have instead added my own changes which allow people to switch between CDN and local at any time. It also lets you choose during the install. The option is contained in the settings menu. Anyone upgrading to the latest commit’s will default to CDN hosted. Simply switching the settings slider and reloading the app will switch you to local resources.

Please let me know how this works.

[Michael]

Good compromise Samer. Thanks works fine.

[Samer]

Thanks to charvel, the web app now has language localization support. Charvel used PHP gettext which should be familiar with those able to assist with translations. The framework is completely integrated and supported thanks to his work. Charvel also added translations for most common languages however only login information is translated at this point.

Another interesting thing, date strings are exported to be localized. If editing the PO files (using Poedit, etc), be sure to reference the PHP date string format before editing this however this will allow dates to be shown in the local format.

https://github.com/salbahra/OpenSprinkler-Controller/commit/3b03742f6b0446d9f96642b24c3d90895bd5f191

[Samer]

The webapp is currently pivoting to jQuery Mobile 1.4. This will result in significant changes to theming but will bring lots of new features and speed enhancements. The groundwork has been merged however the upgrade process is still ongoing. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

Current issues:

– About page loads a black bg then flickers to white (issue with panel)

– Current Status title is too long on iPhone, consider renaming title to Status for mobile devices

– Graphical log viewer lost the left/right arrows for legend scrolling

– Remove custom icons and switch to jQM SVG/PNG icons (higher quality)

– I would like to somehow improve the main page header logo. It looks good now but the borders of the text aren’t smooth.

[Samer]

Charvel has also contributed a forecast page which has been merged into the master branch. This allows users to tap the weather box on the home page, opening the forecast page for the week. The forecast page is very nice and makes use of the weather icons.

[charvel]

Thank you Samer for the upgrading jQuery Mobile 1.4. It is working well now. One issue I have just found: when the weather icon is moon or something like similar then this does not fit perfectly in the box. My suggestion is to add 5 px margin in main.css file.

.wicon {

vertical-align: middle;

display: inline-block;

width: 150px; height: 150px;

margin: -35px -10px -25px -25px;

background: url(../img/weather-icons-sprite.png);

}

[Samer]

The change should have been made. Let me know if it looks better. Thanks!

[charvel]

It is ok now. Thank you.

[Samer]

Charvel has made another wonderful contribution to the webapp. This time it’s weather underground integration. The changes have been merged and have been tested and working.

Over the next few days I will make some minor changes to clean up settings. Right now, device settings and application settings are starting to blur together and I need to fix that.

If anything else is an issue please let me know! Thanks

[Samer]

Significant maintenance was done to the code today. Small improvements were made to the static item’s opening time. For example, rain delay and are you sure dialog’s now open up instantly. More of the app will behave in this fashion when possible.

I also fixed as many bugs as I could find and added password confirmation to every password creation field (installer, change password, and new user).

One of the other major changes were the settings. I reorganized all of them into discrete groups (device vs application). If any of this isn’t intuitive let me know.

I have to apologize to the few user’s working on localization. I have been swapping strings quite often and I know that can be annoying. In the future, I will try to update the english strings less frequently and only when I am sure of the strings wording.

Also, I think it is fair to say the hosted webapp is deprecated. I cannot maintain both copies of the same app. However, I do have a replacement in the pipeline. I cannot promise if/when the replacement will come out however I do have it planned. It will be purely Javascript and be made to run off the SD card in the OpenSprinkler. This copy will obviously work anywhere and can be a drop in replacement to the hosted web app. Initially, this will be built requiring OpenSprinkler firmware 2.0.2 or later.

[jonathon]

Can any of you suggest how to schedule the mobile app to irrigate some stations more than others? As far as I can tell (and I’m a newbie to Open Sprinkler and this forum), each “Program” in the mobile app runs each station for the same length of time. So, for example, the front lawn gets the same time as the side beds. In the “Run Once program” each station can be set to run for a specific number of minutes. But, I can’t see how a station’s irrigation time can be varied in a scheduled program. Any ideas?

[Ray]

The OpenSprinkler user manual explains how to do this:
http://rayshobby.net/?page_id=730#program
check the section entitled “Use the same time settings with different duration times”. Basically, you can set up multiple programs, each with the same start / end / interval time, but with different stations and run times.

[djagerif]

I found a small bug in the Current Status page. When running two stations at the same time, the time remaining at the top of the page is displayed as both station times added together. EG. two stations running 15 minutes each displays 30 minutes remaining.

Ingo

[Samer]

I am trying this out now using a 10 minute program on OSPi (latest from Github). I have sequential unchecked and activated the program by run-once.

Here are my results:

[Author]

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