My yard has 20 zones. Having used the original and then Rachio 2 at another house, would have thought the product would evolve to more than 16 zones. Or at least I could manage two controllers as one (no way my yard can run two zones at once!). The system I replaced was a Hunter that could take 32 zones!
Anyway, now I have to be careful the schedules for each never overlap. It should be easy software to bring two or more controllers together such that they act and schedule as one.
How about it Rachio - I know I can’t be the first to bring this up.
You’re not, and you also aren’t the first to assume that it “should be easy.” I don’t work at Rachio, but I can assure you that if it were truly that easy, they probably would have done it. @franz and the crew don’t take pleasure in watching users “suffer” for their own enjoyment.
FYI, I have 2 controllers running on my property as well. I can usually handle 2 drip zones running at the same time without issue, so I let those mingle in the daytime hours, but 2 grass zones can cause issues with spray patterns, so I run one controllers grass before sunrise, and the other controllers grass zones at sunset.
With respect, I own a product design firm and have a team of 20 embedded software engineers and 11 high level software engineers as well hardware engineers and board prototyping ability. Overall 277 engineers. Integrating two controllers to act as one is straightforward.
The Rachio technology is the selling point. The app interface and limitations of 16 zones are not industry leading.
You clearly know more than me when it comes to software, but without knowing the backbone of the Rachio cloud platform, can you say with certainty that it is a “simple process” to merge two controllers without re-writing the whole platform from scratch?
Again, I just don’t believe that the Rachio team is out to get us and leaving a simple coding change stand between us and multiple controllers…
Agree with @tmcgahey thatit is not always as easy as it might seem to other people without knowing the inner workings. I doubt that they have anywhere close to 200 employees, but could be wrong. That would be a great feature if Rachio is not already working on it or is in the backlog.
Could be. I sprung for the Tempest this time. It serves both Rachio’s so there is already some multi- unit coordination at the app level.
