Community Forums, Moderated > Feature Requests

"chain" two devices together

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ljm:
Although I haven't purchased the controllers yet, I have setup two devices on the LawnCheck website, and I'm pretty impressed!

Have you considered adding a way to "chain" two devices together?  So rather than setting the first to come on at 7:00am and hard-coding the next for 8:30, set it up for the second to start once the first is scheduled to be done?  LawnCheck could even take into account when the first is set to 80% and adjust the starting time of the second one accordingly.

The idea would be to complete the watering in as short as time as possible, without risking that two sprinklers will come on at the same time.

When multi-cycles are involved, it would be particularly cool if LawnCheck could run the first cycle on the first controller, then the first cycle on the second controller, then the second cycle on the first controller followed by the second cycle on the second controller.  It seems like LawnCheck should be able to calculate the start times for each controller without too much difficulty.

-larry

Jim:
Hi Larry,
A few customers have requested this and I have given this some thought.  It's something that is very possible and needs to be done.  Hopefully this winter!

Thanks,

Jim

ljm:
Sounds good!  If you can do that, I think the next logical step would be to remove the "one device per program" limitation.  The reason I have two devices is that I have ten sprinkler heads; ideally I would like to program them as though I only had one device.

As it is now I have to setup two identical "normal programs" (one for each device) that have the same options (in terms of "days on", "months on", number of cycles and weather options) and two more identical "hot day programs".  And I have to remember to pause all four programs when needed :)

The ideal thing would be to have one "normal program" and one "hot day program" where I simply choose all the zones (on any device) that they apply to.

Having said all that though, I need to mention that Lawn Check is already light years ahead of my current timer system, so these requests aren't critical to my adoption of Lawn Check :P

Jim:
Larry,
The current thinking matches that approach.  In essence we'd allow a second controller to be optionally defined as "linked" to a primary controller.  The second controller. if linked to a primary controller, would not have an independent schedule. All of the zones defined in the second controller would show up on the primary controller's program screen.    In essense, the LawnCheck scheduler would build a single 16 zone controller from the two 8 zone devices.

That's the thinking, the rest is time and energy!  Can't commit this to a timeframe yet.

Jim

ljm:
That sounds perfect!

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