The ability to re-order and repeat the stations in a program

[Mark]

It would be very helpful if the program editor allowed one to add the desired stations to the program in any order or as many times as required, rather than just include all stations by default in a set order. This would allow for some very flexible programs that, for example, could run just one or two stations in any order or number of times required; or run all stations (7 in the following examples) in order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ; or 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1; or, my personal favorite, run some stations more than once: 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

I have a hill covered by stations 5 & 6 of a 7 station irrigation system. I currently run stations 5 & 6 30mins each. To reduce run-off I’d like to split the hill watering time across to two 15min runs instead of one 30min run (per station) to allow the water to soak in rather than run down the hill. Creating two programs (one that runs just 5 & 6 and another that runs all 7) would be difficult to time correctly allowing for weather adjustment.

Anyway… there you go.

[Ray]

The OpenSprinkler firmware supports ‘repeating’ start times, which you can use for cycle and soak. Specifically, instead of setting a program to run for 1 hour straight, you can set it to run for 15 minutes each and repeat 3 times, so the total water time is still 1 hour but split over four 15-minute sessions. I understand that you want to cycle and soak only a subset of the stations. At the moment the best way is to split them into two programs as you said. With the upcoming firmware 2.1.6 there shouldn’t be any problem because 2.1.6 uses a queue-based scheduling algorithm, which allows the same station to appear multiple times in the queue.

To change the program data structure to support any arbitrary station orders and replications is a much more difficult task. This requires completely changing the program structure. Unfortunately this is not something we can do right away.

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