PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE add a PAUSE function! :)

I’m guessing A LOT of Rachio users have pets, right? That said, I have a new puppy, along with my older 2 senior dogs. The new puppy has been waking up at 4am which is during my watering schedule and early than the older dogs wake up. I keep having to run and grab my phone and shut down the watering cycle to let me puppy out to go outside. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make a pause function so the cycle can be paused when my dogs need to go outside. THANKS!!!

1 Like

Yes. Please update software with a pause feature. Or would be possible through Ifttt.

+10.

Best regards,

Bill

I wonder how difficult this feature would be to add?
If version 3 is not coming out soon, I hope Rachio will give us something for Christmas.

1 Like

Yes, a Pause button please.

Yes, a PAUSE feature would be wonderful. Pets are the number one reason in this household, but there are countless additional reasons that a Pause function would enhance the usefulness of the Rachio!

Yes. Would this be a difficult addition? I’m not a software expert.

@Robertokc - without seeing Rachio’s code, I’m shooting in the dark here. It could be difficult given - 1) they may have to synchronize/handle the pause over four different environments (mobile app (two flavors), web app, device (two versions) and the back end system), 2) there will be many situations that need to be accounted for - multiple schedules stacked at the same or near time and ready to run, a schedule that is not yet active but becomes active during the pause, cycle and soak - how to handle the pause time, a forgotten pause (i.e. a pause without a restart), a rain or temperature sensor cycling during the pause, what to do about the weather intelligence at the end of the pause, what to do about checking the weather for an upcoming schedule when in pause, pause just the currently running zone and move to the next zone (like cycle and soak) or pause the entire running schedule. Those are the items that just came to my head while composing this post.

While some may think I’m over engineering it or over thinking it and all that is needed is a simple single digit minute countdown time, others will chime in to say they need at least two digits for pause, or three digits or unlimited time, etc. - better to have all the bases covered at the beginning.

I’ll leave it to @franz to correct any of my misconceptions or over/under complexity (inversely simplicity).

2 Likes

I spent part of my past life as a mainframe systems programmer (yep, I’m showing my age!) — and @DLane, you could not have stated this better!!! Something that looks very simple on the surface is often very complex to implement — 5% of the coding job is the actual thing you want to do. 95% of the doing job is taking into account all the “what if’s” that could possibly happen to make it go wrong.

So yes, while it seems simple, its not.

2 Likes

@Linn - Thanks! I wrote my first programs using an IBM 029 and I actually enjoyed 360 Assembler. Right there with you in more than one way.

Thanks for filling me in. I have a new appreciation for this. Do you think pause resume could be done through IFTTT? The freeze feature is working great through this app.

I don’t think so – Pausing for just a short amount of time is very different than the freeze feature I would think. The freeze feature stops a schedule from starting at all, and waiting again until the next schedule is looked at running — a whole lot less complex.

1 Like