Atmel Edge With Paul Rako: Sprinkler 101

• Report rights infringement
• published: 25 Jan 2014
• views: 3869

In this Atmel Edge episode, Analog Aficionado Paul Rako shows us how a small product can have some user interface problems. He ponders how a redesign with Atmel technology like buttons, sliders, and wheels could make the product much easier to use. 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. I love it because it's 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. Then 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. I have a Kill A Watt to look at power. Let's just plug in the transformer -- a watt. Quiescent power, two watts. I had to use this tiny little screwdriver. I'd like to improve or change, if we're going to redesign this. I have actually started to rewrite the instructions in what I consider simpler. It's in manual mode with the little triangle flashing above the 1. -- five watts. I'm going 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. There's no physical button. It's not expensive. You can put a thousand of these buttons on the same circuit board. 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. [Laughter] Here's a money quote: "The software seems to have been written by someone who flunked software programming. Awful. Don't buy it." Now, to the credit of the TORO corporation, they created this online programming assistant. 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. Batteries are going to die. Worse than that, the memory for the program is volatile. The battery dies, you lose all this. 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 Watering time. Program one [PI]. What they mean with "watering time" is watering duration. 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. Now, they've built a feature in -- it's kind of hard to get to. You use the DAY/STN button, here.-- DAYS CYCLE. What it would do is you could set it to 14 days, starting 14 days from now. 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. It points 2, OFF. Okay, next step. DAYS ON/OFF. Once again, for program two. 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. Next step, second watering time.. 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. 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. 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. Press ON/+, it runs. 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." Because Atmel processors have nonvolatile memory you don't need the batteries. We'll start drawing block diagrams.