I wanted to thank the community for all of the feedback we have had with flex schedules. It has been invaluable in helping us revisit how our schedules will work this year. For our Spring release we will be moving back to one unified, simple to use scheduling model.
Flex schedules ultimately helped us determine some things we did right, and some things we missed. In my opinion the dynamic nature was attractive, but configuring them for the normal user was difficult. I even had a difficult time dialing them in last year, and I wrote a lot of the software.
I believe we have developed something that I would call a mixture of flex and fixed, or flixed (marketing is going to hate that). In schedule creation, you will be able to build a standard fixed schedule with intervals, days of week, etc. or choose water as needed. This will build an interval based schedule that will automagically adjust frequency and durations throughout the year. The main difference from flex schedules is this will be easy to understand, predictable, and definitely wonât need the fine tuning that flex sometimes needed. Being engineers, I believe we over engineered with flex.
We are carrying forward one of the important concepts of flex in monitoring soil depletion between schedule runs. If between watering intervals we determine that you can effectively skip an interval due to weather conditions (rain, evapotranspiration), we will skip the schedule for you. You will be able to modify minutes any way you see fit. Frequency modification if needed will be performed with one simple lever.
Here are a couple of examples.
This schedule is for Denver, Colorado using cool season grass and a fixed spray nozzle. Using water as needed we will adjust your schedule throughout the year automatically, while skipping intervals by tracking precipitation and evapotranspiration.
This schedule is for San Jose, California using warm season grass and a fixed spray nozzle. Using water as needed we will adjust your schedule throughout the year automatically, while also skipping intervals by tracking precipitation and evapotranspiration.
When we get closer to software release there will be a lot more information regarding flex transition, etc.
Thanks for your time and we are looking forward to an amazing year. If you like what you see this year, you arenât going to believe what we build out next year
Feel free to provide feedback.