@tmcgashey Yes exactly. 
I’m not buying the inflated complexity you think is there. Its not. What I’ve seen is a word salad of technical terms meant to tell the average user not familiar with them that they are complex. I know EXACTLY how these units operate and frankly my suggestion to turn them into dumb units that execute a master schedule from a virtual controller is a good solution. The complexity is then greatly simplified as it addresses the whole narrative that managing separate devices is difficult. GOOD…combine them into one virtual device and now…guess what? Now you have ONE device to manage and one schedule. Its less complexity not more. Perhaps if it can be explained to me how network connected relays are complex but good luck. I deal with actual complexity at work on a daily basis.
Also the fact that there is some “dynamic” (another salad term) schedule adjustments being applied to schedules is IRRELEVANT because these changes can be applied to a unified table just the same. It has NOTHING to do with that. The fact is that these are just network connected switches and making them out to be some sort of complex device akin to rocket trajectory maintenance is just unnecessary.
I currently have OpenSprinkler units doing just that and with weather/sensor adjustments available.
Whats Rachio needs is for the “complexity” being applied to individual separate units that cant even keep from interfering with each other to remove that complexity from individual units and apply that complexity to a unified schedule made up of one or multiple devices.
Currently I have 2 valve sets comprising of 3 valves each. One outdoor housed controller controlling the back yard valves and one in the garage controlling the front yard valves. So 6 valves to operate in total.
The unit in the garage is the main controller that has three of its ports mapped (pointed to IP and port) to the first three ports on the unit on the back patio. All the valves become part of a sequential schedule (meaning they run in sequence and wont rob water pressure regardless if the user overlaps schedules they will wait for one to finish before starting the next), the three valves in my front yard run a repeating schedule set to repeat 4 times throughout the night at 2-3 min a piece…(I have a slightly sloping front lawn and need to do this to minimize runoff) the back yard units run twice (once in the late evening and once in the early morning).
I currently don’t but could apply weather adjustments (multiple choices), sensor or rain delays etc to the the schedule OR I can adjust ALL the valves in unison by trimming them on a % basis by reducing the run time percentage.
If I could do the above with Rachio units I would and so would a bunch of folks. I currently can only recommend Rachio to people with one valve set while to anybody with multiple valve sets I recommend OpenSprinkler.
10 Years is more than enough time to figure this out…
