Arable Mobile 4.2.0 Release Notes

Date

Aug 30, 2021

Scope

General Release

OS Support

iOS 13, 14; Android 8, 9, 10 and 11

Language Support

English; Mobile: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Ukrainian and Polish

Screen Size & Resolution

Minimum 540 x 960 pts screen resolution and 4.5” screen size

Type of Release

Minor Release

Version

iOS 4.2.0, Android 4.2.0

Description

Aside from many of the same updates as Arable Web (which can be seen in the Web 9.2.0 release notes), Arable Mobile has been equipped with a fast-path for assigning devices to sites after deployment. You will find this capability by swiping left and selecting “show” in “Unassigned Devices” on the Weather screen. After enabling this, you can either select to associate the new devices with an existing site if it is nearby by using “Add Device to Site” or to “Create New Site.” If you select the latter, you will automatically be able to select the crop-varietal and season duration as part of naming the site. For many crop-varietal combinations, there are default values for the season duration that you can use. Note: if you have deployed the Arable Mark with any auxiliary sensor, like an anemometer or a soil moisture probe, then you will need to go to the Arable Web’s Devices list and validate those specific settings.

By default, 25 sites are loaded in the Map and on the Weather list. This provides the best balance between response time and usability. More sites can be loaded at any time by scrolling to the bottom of the list and by swiping left in the Map. Note: the search capability in the Weather list has been enhanced to take into account all the information on the server so you don’t need to load the whole list for this purpose.

The Arable Mobile list section has three new lists. The Growth Stage list has a table to help identify which growth stage each of the sites have progressed to in the current active season and crop-varietal combination. The Crop Growth list is more dynamic; you can sort based on both GDD and NDVI to compare sites with one another. The new Device list summarizes device status in the form of battery percentage, connectivity signal strength and last sync time for the whole fleet in one page. A tooltip gives the name of the site(s) that the device is associated with. If several sites are listed, the right arrow function will bring you to the site with the most recent device activity. Note: the Weather screen list allows for a notification per site if the data records have not been updated within 1.5 hours. This is shown as a small red watch on the right side of the site name.

To help you get started on the transition from location-view to Sites, Arable Customer Success has a script that can be run and automatically generate sites for your current active Mark deployments as well as to transition your seasons and alerts settings. More information on this will come during onboarding activities for Sites with Customer Success.

A few other improvements have been made specifically to the alerts section in the Settings tab. The default alert subscriptions are now specific to each organization where they are set instead of being applied to all organizations that you belong to. With Sites, you can see the site-specific alert configuration in Arable Mobile, but you can only create or edit them in Arable Web. Finally, in order to avoid excessive alerts, we have standardized a 6-hour hysteresis unless otherwise noted in the info modals.  

Once Arable Customer Success has enabled for Sites and Water Insights for you, the Irrigation drop-down will be replaced by a Water screen. On this screen, you can select daily, weekly and per-growth-stage aggregations; there is still the option to select alternative measurements by swiping left to view the Edit View menu. If you are deploying with a soil moisture probe, note that the Field Capacity and Permanent Wilting Point have to be set in Arable Web first, as the Water Insights feature will display the soil moisture level as a percentage of Available Water Content (AWC) instead of the Volumetric Water Content (VWC) that is used in the Map. 

On the Spray Timing screen, you can swipe left to reach the Edit View and select your own measurement to track. Apart from the previously available measurements (Leaf Wetness, Rain and Wind), you can now also select to show Maximum Temperature, Relative Humidity, VPD and Solar Radiation. Regardless of which ones you select, we aim to provide a 24-hour forecast for each in the banner.  

Arable Mobile only shows operational sites so as not to clutter the user interface with old sites. A site is considered operational if it has had an Arable Mark reporting data to it within the last week (last 7 days). We changed the way device states are handled, to avoid showing a lot of devices in inactive state (e.g., pulled out of the field without a proper undeployment). If a device has not communicated for more than 9 months, it will automatically set to a removed state. If it starts communicating again, it will switch back to an active state without any manual intervention. 

Description

We updated our rainfall processing system to address some recent instances of underreporting. In some cases, if a data record's time stamp overlapped with another (say, both wind and rain were reported at exactly the same time), only one of them was recorded, resulting in a possible undercount of either wind or rainfall data. This may have affected some of your past data. We have a fix already in place to gather clean data moving forward. Please reach out to your account rep if you'd like more info.

In the Spray Timing drop-down, we had labeled both hourly and daily Solar Radiation with the same measurement unit in the previous release. Now the proper labelling is done with daily presented as MJ/m2 and hourly as W/m2.

In the previous release, viewing details of an Untitled Location in the Map screen might have triggered an app restart. This has now been prevented. It is, however, still recommended to always name your location (and site) before starting to use the app for device data access, as naming also triggers the tracking of its location. 

Previously, when the name of the measurement in the Edit Water View section was too long, and the user selected delete, the button overlapped with the text name of the measurement. This is now resolved.

Description

An entire organization should transition to using Sites all at the same time, since naming convention is different than with the location view, and could cause confusion if some have transitioned and others have not. If it is not possible to update the complete org to Sites all at once, please use Sites for dedicated devices and users to limit any impact on other users. An automated naming for new Arable Mark deployments will occur as soon as one of the device owners has Sites enabled. The location name will then be device ID + deployment time stamp. Note that users who have location-view enabled can still go and edit this name in the Weather screen.  

While there is now a set of aggregations to select from in the Water details drop-down (daily, weekly and per-growth-stage), that has come at a bit of a price in terms of performance. For extended season datasets, it may take 10 seconds or more to switch between the aggregations (and might even time out on iOS). We are looking to improve this with a hotfix soon.

There is not yet any Search capability in the new Devices and Crop Growth lists that we introduced with this release. This is planned to be added in an upcoming release.

For Water Balance deployments connecting the GEMS pressure switch on the analog interface, there will be no wind direction provided in the user interface. A future combination of local wind speed and remote-sensed wind direction is planned.  

The max/min temperature readings on the My Operations/Daily screen show observed data only, while the individual location details screens for Heat Spikes and Frost Events take into account both observed and forecasted hours for the current day. We expect a solution for this user interface consistency issue in the next release.

If the local anemometer wind data is missing due to a Mark 2 device’s failure to report in, there is no automatic gap-fill of this data with remote-sensed wind in the current release for daily values, as it is done for hourly values. This will be reviewed for an upcoming release together with an overall gap-fill strategy for daily data including not only wind but also temperature.

Data columns in the Weather Daily list can misalign when swiping horizontally to see new dates. A complete resolution is expected in a future release. Current workaround is to refresh the list.

The Alerts icon counter is not automatically updated unless the user taps on the icon. We are planning to add a 5-min refresh to handle this in the next upcoming release

When the user changes the settings data from Arable Web or on a different phone, they will need to go back to the Settings screen in Arable Mobile to get the measurement units updated on the Map screen and elsewhere.

The remote-sensed temperature data can show a difference between hourly and daily max/min temperature, as they are measured slightly differently. For the remote-sensed enhanced forecast, the hourly values represent the projected temperature at that forecast time (usually top of the hour). However, the max/min temps often occur within the hour and the daily forecast products capture that. There is currently no short-term solution for this discrepancy. 

The local Mark max/min temperature for the hour is taken as the max/min of all 5-min interval readings during that hour. Meanwhile, the current temperature is the average for the last hour, creating a discrepancy between the two values during weather alerts. We are investigating whether relying on a 5-min interval for Tmin/Tmax is vulnerable to noise, and if so, will change this algorithm.

For forecast temperature, the hourly values represent the projected temperature at that forecast time (usually top of hour). However, oftentimes the max/min temps occur within the hour, so the daily forecast products capture that.

Terms & Conditions are e-mailed in English, regardless of what language is registered. As a workaround, a link to alternative languages is provided in the email. 

The alerts in the My Alerts log are shown in English even if another language is selected in Arable Mobile. A solution is expected in the next release.

Push notifications are presented based on the language configured on the phone and not the language set in Arable Mobile. A future implementation could change this behavior.

When clicking on a notification, the app will navigate to either the Heat Spikes or Frost Events screens, but won’t open the hourly records to point out the current-hour row. This behavior will be improved in the coming releases of the weather alerts feature.