2019 refresh: Features, Fixes and Improvements.

Our flagship controller, RainMachine Touch HD-12 (12 Valve) is back in stock and available for purchase at Amazon as well as our store. The RainMachine Touch HD-16 (16 valves) will be available during the early/mid-Feb time frame, first at our store and soon to be followed by Amazon and other online selling trusted partners.

What's new in 2019

The Rainmachine Touch HD-12/HD-16 2019 refresh offers better Wi-Fi, added support for selected dual-band 2.4/5GHz WIFI adapters (RealTek 8814 chipset) as well as hundreds of new or existent feature updates.
Please note that the 2019 release is available on the new Rainmachine devices and will become available for download soon.
Here are some of the new features, fixes, and improvements (currently available in Beta Firmware).

Firmware
- Added Finish Before/After Sunrise or Sunset as the program start time. This feature allows programs to be scheduled dynamically to finish before or after Sunrise or Sunset with a specified offset.
- Added Local Weather Push API that allows weather data to be pushed to RainMachine either on a local network or from other services. This allows direct integration with personal weather station through use of software like weeWX, cumulusMX or similar. This service is disabled by default but can be enabled in the Developers tab of the Weather Services.
Please see this page for details on how to integrate RainMachine with WeeWX.
- Fix next run display for programs with start date > 2 years in the future.
- Fix for Weather Underground not able to read historical data from certain stations
- Programs that skip watering due to Adaptive Frequency are now correctly logged in Water Log.
- Added Rotors High Rate for the higher precipitation rate rotors sprinkler type.
- Added Pause feature that allows to temporarily pause watering for a certain amount.
This is currently only usable from Web UI and it will pause for a predefined 30 minutes.
- Fix Relative Humidity being wrongly calculated when only minimum and maximum were received from the weather service.
- Reworked Weather Underground weather service to allow personal weather stations data gathering without an API key.
The API key is still needed to receive the forecast from Weather Underground.
- Force-authorization for NetAtmo service in case the token becomes invalid.
- Updated API to 4.6 version to reflect the new API calls like Pause.
- Improve the security of locally accessed devices.
- Automatic updates check should now trigger correctly after a program run if no programs will run in the next hour.
- Added back the local plain HTTP access by port 8081 as it was used on several 3rd party integrations.
- Fixed Reboot during watering notifications not always getting sent.
- Programs run notification now include the total duration the program will run.
- Improved responsiveness for login API in certain cases.
- The web interface can now be loaded through HTTP, beside HTTPS.
- Bushes and Trees had been split into separate types in Zone Settings.
- Water deficit during a user set Restriction can be set to be carried to the next watering cycle or not.
- Fix for Programs Zone Order being lost after a device reboot.
- Fix Water Surplus flag not always showing correctly in Watering History.
- Fix for irrigation carry over for the next schedule when zone minimum watering duration was not met if the soil had no available water.

RainMachine Touch HD-12/HD- 16 family:
- Added dynamic support for changing the WIFI modules. This is limited by a list of known modules that we know to be working but it can be extended.
- Added support for dual-band (5GHz) WIFI adapters based on RealTek 8814 chipset.
- Reworked the WIFI reconnect algorithm to improve connectivity on some corner cases when using repeaters or dual-band routers.

RainMachine Touch HD-12/HD-16 family - Local Touch Interface:
Improvements:
- Improvements to adding remote access functionality.
- Secure remote access API calls.
- Rotors low vs high rate.
- Add Pause/Resume watering functionality.
- Different vegetation types for trees and bushes.
- Program start time "Finish by" functionality.
- Confirmation dialog for copying a program.

Fixes:
- Unknown sunrise/sunset start time.
- Try reconnecting when WiFi connection suddenly disappears.
- Make sure WiFi does not get disconnected when the device is sleeping.
- A better approach to loading the data after reboot.
- Better reset to factory behavior.
- Use Google Maps API to render a static map when setting the location.
- UI tweaks.
- Alternative UI flow if location setup fails for some reason.
- Fix WiFi crash in some rare scenarios.

RainMachine Mini-8
- Increase the setup grace period to 2 minutes before the user must press a key on the device.

Web interface
- Added Finish Before/After Sunrise or Sunset as program start time options.
- Renamed Minimum Watering Time in zone properties to Minimum Rollover duration and updated the help text to better explain what the option does.
- Added a better UI for Weather Underground weather service.
- Improved some of the help messages.
- Added Pause feature, a pause button will show up during watering that allows the user to delay the watering for 30 minutes.
- The About page should now list updates more reliable on slow connections.
- Reduce the used bandwidth by not requesting data if UI is not in view.