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Hi. Welcome to the Atmel Edge. My name is Paul Rako.
In this episode we're going to do a system-level redesign. We're going to begin it, for a popular
sprinkler clock. They're sometimes called sprinkler timers. What this product does is
control six of these sprinkler valves that turn on various sprinklers in your home or
garden or in a commercial setting. This product I bought -- this very product myself, a year
or two ago. And the programming's a little difficult. I love it because it's small. It'll
control six valves. So that's really remarkable for something this small. What I didn't realize
is the small size makes the user interface a little bit more difficult than it has to
be.
So we're going to go through this from block diagrams. Kind of looking at what we have,
trying to program this one, seeing what that's like, and come up with an alternate, and then
apply some technology that Atmel can help you with. Things like button, wheels, and
sliders, where you don't need physical, discrete switches anymore. You can just have a circuit
board, and have an area on the circuit board where we can implement various control functions,
and let you program this thing in a much simpler and more intuitive way. So let's get started.
Okay. So we're going to look at the overall system design, and what we can do to improve
this product. I have a Kill A Watt to look at power. Its reading zero, now, like you'd
want it to read. So I haven't connected both wires to the sprinkler clock. So let's just
plug in the transformer -- a watt. Pretty significant, not horrible. I like the mechanical
design of this. You can slide back this cover and you get the battery compartment up here,
and then the connections. This is going to be a little sketchy cause we're doing it live.
If people do it to my products, I'm going to do it to theirs. So, we're going to hook
up -- 24 volt ac. Sprinkler clocks run on ac. If you run them on dc the wires and valves
and all the stuff in the ground corrodes terribly. So this is an ac transformer, ac going in
here to run sprinkler valves. Here's a sprinkler valve. So, let's look: two watts. Quiescent
power, two watts. That's just nothing plugged in, nothing running.
When you're doing this you should make a little list, things that you don't like, so that
you can redesign them. And right now, what I don't like, the manual that came with the
product, tiny, tiny type. If you own a home and need a sprinkler clock, you're probably
a little bit older, and can't read 0.2 pico type. So, manual, small. What else? It's well
written in the terms of the syntax and the English, but it's hard to understand -- hard
to understand -- and we'll give you links, you can go read it yourself and see what you
think. Hard to understand.
The next problem I had, you just saw I had to use this tiny little screwdriver. I had
to dig and dig to find one small enough to fit these tiny little terminals that they
used. So that's something I'd like to improve or change, if we're going to redesign this.
And I'm hoping to take this all the way to hardware, and put it open source, and you
folks can all play with it. Tiny terminals -- tiny terminals. And next, and to a musician
like myself, where you're always running out of batteries -- the batteries are always dying
in your stomp box, ruining your performance -- I hate that the product needs batteries.
None of the programming of functions work because the batteries power that. The 24 volts
must just go to some TRIACs or SCRs that run the sprinklers. So, let's get in -- it's kind
of clever. I do like this. You put the battery in here and then slide it. That's kind of
cute. Good mechanical engineering on this. And all the segments light up. We'll get an
insert shot of that. It's gorgeous. All the LCD segments light up. It reads 12 o'clock.
So, the first thing, let's see if it works, right? The way a customer would use this,
first thing you're going to do is wire it to the sprinklers. So, once again, because
everything's tiny in this world, I'm -- I have this junker sprinkler I got from my friend
Everardo. I'm going to wire that. Oh, boy, oh, boy. Try it again. I'm starting to lose
my patience. They should make people do this in the rain, or better yet, a hailstorm, on
gravel. And then maybe the product designers of the world will understand. I'm wiring it
1 to station 1, and then there's a C. I have actually started to rewrite the instructions
in what I consider simpler.
Because I read the manual 400 times to understand it, I know you can press this a few times,
and it goes around and around, finally gets to manual. It's in manual mode with the little
triangle flashing above the 1. So we should hear -- put it right here so you folks hear
it. Haaa? Turn it off. What I like is there's a little delay. I don't know that I like it,
it's just interesting. When you press the ON button here, or these four buttons, it
turns on instantly. But watch it. Going off, there's a little delay. So, let's turn it
on. Oops. I can see I accidentally kicked it out of watts -- five watts. So it's taking
five watts now. We know two go -- one goes in the transformer, one goes into quiescent
current in the product. Who knows what the battery is -- probably minuscule. And then
a couple [3] of watts here. I don't want to burn this up, so we'll turn it off.
So that's a little hardware characterization that we've done. We kind of know things work.
That's good to go. I'm going to stop here and get some closeup shots for you, and start
going through the programming. And that's where I think, with a redesign and rethinking,
and using some modern cool-person things like button sliders and wheels. So. See here, there's
no physical button. It's not expensive. You can put a thousand of these buttons on the
same circuit board. There's no real cost, other than three more pins. Every button needs
a couple pins. Every wheel needs three pins on one of our microprocessors. So you can
see the intensity changing there.
So, let's keep going. I'm going to tear it back down. We're going to get some close up
shots so you can watch the programming. And that's something I have a problem with this
product. So, catch you in a second.
You can tell that I'm not just the only one having troubles programming this product.
If you go on Amazon, where the product's listed, you can see it's got a low star rating here.
Let's go look at these ten customer reviews. "Couldn't agree more." "Wanted to add ... several
months ... find it pain to use. Clumsy and old style. The interface is involved, non-intuitive,
small, hard to see. Text mask," well, that's just a little production problem. "Very difficult
and confusing to program and use. And it has bugs." [Laughter] Here's a money quote, "The
software seems to have been written by someone who flunked software programming. Awful. Don't
buy it." Not everybody's unpleased. This fellow used it for a rental unit. "Works okay. Great
little controller." Here's another, "Interface is horrible and not easy at all. Fuse bad,"
I'm a hardware guy. You can't blame the company for an occasional bad fuse. And he probably
shorted it out. But, "Poor quality." Interesting. They say, "Poor quality." The product's got
great quality, especially the mechanical engineering. "Could not get this product programmed." So
right there is proof of the pudding. "Did not work. Did not get a," okay, that's an
irrelevant one. There's a lot of things here that show that people are having trouble programming
it. Now, to the credit of the TORO corporation, they created this online -- I found this through
Google by putting the product name in -- they did this whole, online programming assistance.
And the Google page took me here, to page 19. So, let's try it up this way. Sprinkler
basics, page two, page one, and it's got animations, and it's got explore, and it's -- this is
really fancy web programming stuff -- and little hover helps to explain what stuff is.
Problem is, explaining what it is doesn't tell you what it's for, why it's there, or
how you should use it. So this is a common technical writing problem. Page one, page
two, three, four. In other words, get a computer science degree, and pretty soon you'll be
able to understand -- in my mind, knowing that TORO's in Minnesota, they're nice people
that had some crappy embedded programing for the product itself. And then this web programming,
I find it as complicated, and as hard to understand. TORO's a good outfit. We're going to get back
to the show, now, and show you some of the things that we're thinking of to make this
product more intuitive.
All right. I mentioned that I didn't like products with batteries, because the batteries
are going to die. Worse than that, the memory for the program is volatile. The battery dies,
you lose all this programming that we're going to show you right now. So let's plug these
batteries in. Hopefully, we can see it. And I'll try to go through the programming. I
will need spectacles, because [Laughter] young people must design products these days.
So, we just applied power. It wakes up in the SET TIME/DAY, right here. It shows Sunday
at 12:00 AM, which is obviously wrong. So what you want to do is, DAY/STN -- it happens
to be Tuesday, today -- and then here -- I always forget. I think -- let me go this direction,
see if it's -- no -- that's PM. That's exactly what we want, because it's in the afternoon.
I'll look. It's about 4:30. So you hold this down, you hold this down, you hold this down.
4:30. Okay. So now the time. The day is correct, Tuesday. I want -- This is something else
I don't like, needing to program the date. You need day and time. The sprinkler doesn't
have to go off within the minute. I just want it to go off sometime about three, two, three
in the morning. Let's see if we can figure a way around that while simplifying the product.
So it says next step, here. Let's try that. Watering time. So now what this -- the thing
that was so hard to understand in the manual -- see this right here? Program one [PI].
So it's program one watering time. And it's for station 1, that one we had hooked up.
So there's 1 through 6 here. Interestingly they're numbered in reverse order here, 1
through 6 to the right. But let's pretend that we have three of these hooked up. We
have three sprinklers. And the first one, when they say watering time, this is just
a translation error. I have to assume the product was designed offshore. It's not watering
time. To me that means, oh, two in the morning. Turn on the sprinkler. What they mean with
"watering time" is watering duration. How long are you going to run the sprinkler. So
-- making sure we can read this -- let's go up -- oh, let's do five minutes. Are those
seconds, minutes? I guess -- Five minutes. Then you go station -- we want 1 and 2 to
run for five minutes. Go up -- five. I think that's five minutes. I hope it's not five
seconds.
So now, next step, the days on or off. This is another thing I don't like -- jot it down
while we have it in our head -- specific days. Here's a problem with the seven-day week that
we've used since the Roman times. It's not divisible. So, unless you're doing once a
week -- you're only going to sprinkle on Thursday, which isn't very likely -- it's not a useful
thing. Now, they've built a feature in -- it's kind of hard to get to. You use the DAY/STN
button, here. It's flashing at Sunday, you'll notice, right here. So use the day button,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And then it goes here. The arrow points down
here -- like an afterthought, they fit it in -- DAYS CYCLE. What this says, it'll never
turn on. Go up one, this means it will sprinkle every day, and it will start that sprinkling
one day from now. If you set it to 15 days -- let's go down and see -- yeah, 14 days.
What it would do is you could set it to 14 days, starting 14 days from now. And then
five days later you'd come and it would say 9. You'd see 14 starting in 9 more days. But
we want to do the first two, five minutes, every day. That's my -- not roses -- my little
geraniums and some other stuff that I have, some cactus in the front. Just a little bit
of water every day.
So, okay, fine. Next -- PI, oops. Maybe we didn't put it in. Maybe we waited too long.
One, one. Good. It just keeps going around and around, one, one. So then, next step -- this
was also quite confusing. 1, 2, 3, here, on the edge, this thing allows you to turn it
on three times a day. Now, maybe if you're selling vegetables in San Jose you want to
spray your vegetables three times a day. I just need the thing to turn on once a day.
I'll make it long enough to give enough water. So, here, now they're finally asking you what
time of day do you want to turn it on for the first time of that day? So, 12:00 AM -- I
already did this, and I've forgotten already. It's quite embarrassing. PM. No. I want thing
to go off -- what do you think? Two in the morning? That was nice. Changed faster than
I think. So, okay. Here. So, two in the morning. It'll go off here, the first time.
So next step. It points 2, OFF. I don't want it to turn on more than once a day. Very difficult
to understand in the manual. Third time. I don't want it to turn [ON] off again. Okay,
and you press one more time, and it's saying watering time, you get very confused. What's
going on? I just did this. Notice here, over here it says PII, program two. And what's
so impossibly hard to decipher, cause they -- I just assumed you could set any station
of the six stations to go off as often or as infrequently as you want for as long or
as short. Doesn't work like that. A program is how often it goes in the week -- once a
week, every three days, every other day, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, all that business.
So now, program two, it allows you -- before I was going every single day. Now we can say
watering time 1, well, 1 and 2 we already did. So let's go to number 3. Well, I want
it now to go 15 minutes, because this is the grass. But I don't want to water the grass
-- oops, 57 minutes. Maybe that's a little excessive. Let's go back down to 15. 15 minutes.
Okay. And if you go one more station, OFF, OFF. If I go too far it's going to give percentage
of time, and it gets you dead ended, and it's horrible, so I'm not even going to go there.
Next step. Okay, it's done watering time for program two on station -- here, we can go
-- well, no. I can't. I can't move it. Trust me. I've been here. I spent hours to figure
this thing out.
Okay, next step. DAYS ON/OFF. Once again, for program two, how often do you want it
to work? Well, I think it's ridiculous to try to pick days of the week. That's just
me. So, I go DAY/STN, all the way around here. And instead of 0, 0, not going at all, 3,
3, which means, every third day I'll water the lawn for 15 minutes, and it'll start doing
that 3 days from now. All right?
Next step. The first time of that day. Let's make that -- this is almost painful. We did
the other one at 2:00 AM, let's do this one at 3:00. So at 3:00 AM, it'll go off. That's
your first watering time.
Next step, second watering time. I don't want to do it. It's not a vegetable stand. So,
I'll leave that OFF. Next one, third watering time. So we go around twice, once for program
one, once for program two.
NEXT STEP, MANUAL. Also very confusing, there's three manuals. This is manual. It doesn't
say PI or II. When you press the station, pick one of these stations, and it just rolls
around. Hooray. Say ON, power goes to that station. Say OFF, it turns off.
Now, press NEXT STEP again. Notice it says MANUAL. It's got a little triangle by MANUAL.
But it says PI, which means when you press on now, it runs that program. If you have
six sprinklers going, or six stations, whatever it is, it's going to go through that sequence.
It won't turn on more than one at a time. It doesn't have the power. This little transformer,
and the size of that valve, you can tell it won't be able to do that. So even if tell
it to turn stuff on at the same time, its smart enough to say, "Well, I can't do that."
So when I'm done with program one -- valve one, program one -- I'll do valve two, valve
three, valve four, and then go to program two.
So, here we are. MANUAL, PI. If I hit on It would run through those two -- 1 and 2 -- see
how confusing this is getting? So let's go next step. Now, all that's changed is PII,
its showing up program two. So, MANUAL. Little triangle here. PII, right there, turn on,
it'll run program two, and show that this insanely complicated programing you just did
actually took.
Next step, we're back home. This is like the quiescent state, where the little triangle
is pointing to AUTO RUN/OFF. And what's nice there is you press OFF/-, it says OFF. Now
it won't work at all. None of the valves will turn on. Press ON/+, it runs. So as you're
going out the driveway and you just want to turn it off, you hit one button. You can kind
of see the intent. It's just so.... after six months I accidentally picked it up. I
was cleaning up. I must have hit some buttons, got it mis-programmed. Took a day to figure
out. And what hung me up that time was forgetting that well, now, program one can only go off
either you go every day or you go three days, or use certain days of the week. That's all
a program can do. And I kept trying -- after I said, oh, I want these two to go every day,
then I'd still be in program one, and I'd try to say, but number three I want to go
every three days for 15 minutes. And it would just be in a loop. Its like, "What happened
to the first ones I programmed?" I think, with the addition of some Atmel technology,
buttons, sliders, and wheels -- I talked to Andreas, one of our brilliant marketing guys.
He said, "You might want to think of using a SAM D20 for this." He said, "Every slider
takes three pins. Every wheel takes three pins."
So, next show we're going to architect. We're going to talk about what I don't like, and
how we can get rid of the batteries and do things like that. And it's not going to have
all these whizzy, whizzy features. You won't be able to start it down to the second. But
I think it will serve the same function, and will be much more obvious and intuitive. And
-- because Atmel processors have nonvolatile memory you don't need the batteries. So there
is a lot of cool things you'll see. We'll start drawing block diagrams. We'll start
showing what's going on. And I ordered an extra one from Amazon that we can tear apart
and see what microprocessor they used, if anything else.
So, thanks a lot. Thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for sticking through that incredibly
tedious programming. And see you next time for Sprinkler 102.
Right now, Atmel Edge. I'm Paul Rako. Thank you.