Timer

[beelzerob]

Well, "pause" implies you'll be starting the countdown again from its current value. So, if the countdown timer COULD be paused, if the countdown gets to 5 seconds and the Stop Event runs, then you'd pause the countdown timer at 5 seconds "until the next zone runs"...and then what? Start the countdown timer again at 5 seconds, which will then hit 0 5 seconds later? Or "once the next zone runs", would you then again reset the countdown timer to 45? In which case you don't want to pause the timer, so much as you want the ability to ignore the timer once it reaches zero if you don't need it anymore....right?

That being the case, what I would probably do is create a flag in the variables driver to be able to control if the timer event should be respected or not. *shrug*

[Dean Roddey]

You couldn't just check for exactly 45 seconds, since it'll unlikely the driver will update the field on exactly the second boundary. You'll need to check for greater than, so that it happens on the first time past it, which won't be very long after the actual second boundary.

[kayemsi]

I have had problems with my Rain8 somewhat like you describe, but my issue is that my Master server resets itself fairly often and that has happened while the Rain8 was running and it just continued to run until I noticed it. Since the server resets, the rain8 senses the com port come back so doesn't think it needs to do the default 10 minute watering shutoff it is supposed to have if it totally loses communication with the PC.

Since the whole server resets, it loses all the timer info that was supposed to turn it off anyway. I guess a really robust solution would involve logging the zone start and requested stop times (and acknowlegement flag that the driver sets when it issues the stop command) to a database or something persistant that a scheduled event could check periodically and figure out if it needed to send a stop command if the stop time has expired and the acknowlegement flag had not been set.

I don't remember if the driver comes online while a zone is currently running, if the driver can tell it is running.

[Dean Roddey]

Why is the master server resetting itself? Do you mean just spontaneously rebooting?

[kayemsi]

Yes, the PC reboots itself and when I check on it, I often see the Windows message that Windows recovered from a serious error. I think it has to do with my video card that has outputs to both a moniter (1600x1200) and my receiver/1080p projector.

[Dean Roddey]

If you poke around in the Windows event log you might get some more clues as to what's going on and where the problem lies. Eventually that kind of thing is pretty likely to corrupt something and start things going downhill kind of badly.