Arable Release Notes

Date: November 29, 2020
Scope: General Release
OS Support: iOS 12, 13, 14; Android 8, 9, 10
Language Support: 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
Version: iOS 3.2.1, Android 3.2.1

** Note: Arable released Mobile 3.2.1 immediately after 3.2.0. These release notes reflect the later release.

Release Overview

Arable Mobile 3.2.1 is a minor release with several valuable improvements. The most substantial new feature is an Analytics tab that will host one or more insight dashboards created by the Arable team, with input from customers. The dashboards can be fairly simple (e.g., a different rendering of existing Arable Mark data) or quite complex (e.g., powered by a custom agronomic model). The dashboards can be standard or customer-specific (at Org and even Team level). A dashboard can even be restricted to be viewed only in Arable Mobile and not in the accompanying Analytics feature in Arable Web. Overall, this new feature has a lot of potential and we are excited to explore it with you.

In addition, Crop Growth is now infilled and backfilled with remote-sensed temperature data for the GDD calculation if the Arable Mark had not been deployed throughout the season.

There are two new alerts: Device Tilts and New Locations. Device Tilts will help identify early if a Mark and its associated pole have for some reason shifted from their vertical position, warranting a trip to the field. New Location will give an immediate indication of a successful deployment has occurred.

We have also updated wind data processing both from the connected Davis 6410 anemometer as well as to the processing of remote-sensed data. The short-term (first hour) forecast for precipitation and temperature have been improved by combining current 15 min reading with forecasted 15-min readings for the current hour. Both these changes will help with the overall accuracy of the data shown in Arable Mobile.

We hope you will enjoy this new release and feedback is always welcome through Customer Success (support@arable.com) or via your account manager.

New Features

• A new Analytics screen has been added to the main navigation selector. The purpose of the screen, and Analytics overall, is to enable faster and more flexible new analyses to fit a customer’s specific need. They can be as simple as displaying the existing Mark measurements in a novel way, or they can expand to employ custom models and multiple data sources.
• Analytics dashboards are created by the Arable team with input from customers. The Analytics screen in Arable Mobile will contain one or more dashboards in a menu drop-down for each Org-Team. There are two types of dashboards: standard and custom. Standard dashboards are shown to all customers; custom dashboards may be published specifically to one Organization or even a single Team. Every dashboard can be published only to Arable Mobile, only to Arable Web, or to both.
• Two new alerts have been added:
  Device Tilts: This alert is part of the device alert category. By default the alert is triggered if a device registers >10° angle from vertical for at least 3 hours. An Org Admin can modify the angle threshold between 0° to 45°. The time duration hysteresis is fixed.
  New Locations: This alert is also part of the device alert category. It is triggered any time a new deployment location is generated. The user subscribes to this alert along with the previous Inactive Locations alert.
• When tapping on a new Device Tilts push notification on your phone, the user will be taken to the Device screen. Tapping on the New Location alert push notification will bring up the Location Naming screen.
• The Crop Growth screen and associated GDD calculations have several improvements. If a user were delayed in deploying a Mark until after their Season started, the system will now use remote-sensed temperature data for the GDD calculation. The system now has more crops and varietals added, and some varietals now have defined default growth stages. Anyone still missing a crop-varietal pair can reach out to Arable Customer Success, and we can help assess GDD temperature thresholds and load them into the system. A more complete document on the default data settings and sources will soon be published on our website.
  The banner in the Crop Growth location details screen now has a label to indicate the dominant source (local or remote sensed data) of the current GDD value, if there is an associated Growing Season selected.
• The local wind direction calculation now uses a polynomial regression model function on the incoming voltage. Remote-sensed wind speed uses a 2m height (formerly 10m) to align with local wind speed data. As a safeguard against errors, remote-sensed data is shown if there are any abnormal readings from local wind (0 or > 80 km/h). Several firmware improvements have also been made to improve local wind data even further (see Firmware 1.1.0.12 Release Notes).
• The short-term (first hour) forecasts for precipitation and temperature now combine current 15-min readings with forecasted 15-min readings for the current hour. This will show up in the Frost Events and Heat Spikes screens.
• The soil moisture reading on the Irrigation details screen banner now provides the current hour’s data, instead of the previous weekly average.
  Alerts are marked as read (and cleared from the notifications badge on the main navigation Alerts icon) when the user leaves the My Alerts log screen.
  

  Defect Fixes

  • The original 3.2.0 build showed intermittent crashes when going to the Location details pages from the My Operations / Daily list. This has been corrected in the 3.2.1 build that is available on both AppStore and GooglePlay.
  • On some phones, the Language Save button could be covered by the camera. This has been resolved.
  • When using a headset, the alert signal volume was unpleasantly loud. We have changed to a more gradual increase in volume.
  • If the Mark had not yet synced since the previous midnight, it was not clear to the user if only one hour or multiple hours had passed since the last reading, and what the value referred to (e.g., temperature on the My Operation screen). This was corrected by giving a more explicit statement of when the last reading was provided by the Mark.
  • Leaf Wetness in Spanish is now labeled Superficie (“Surface”).
  • Precipitation (Last 48 hrs) on the Mobile location details Summary screen included false forecasted data. This has now been corrected.
  • Users with 500+ locations in their account could run into a memory issue when scrolling down to the end of the Daily list screen. This has been resolved.
  • If a user entered an incorrect user ID, there was no error message shown on the login page, nor when scrolling the same page with incorrect user ID. This has been resolved.
  • We had seen random crashes on Android, related to a React Native library version. We made an upgrade of this library in this release.
  • The Mark 2 marker in the Map could previously be gray even if the device was syncing correctly. This was a cosmetic issue but is now fixed in this release by allowing up to four hours of delay in syncing before showing the icon as grayed out on the map.
  • Map view did not contain rain for the current day in the 10-day historical precipitation measurement. It is now included in this release.
  • The maximum length for a location name was 20 characters in Mobile 3.1.0; it is now 30 characters. 
    
    
    

    Known Issues

  • 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.
  • Wind data as shown on the Map screen is the average for today. This is planned to change to current wind in order to be more actionable in a future 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. 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.
  • 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-minute 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.
  • 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 e-mail.
  • 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.
  • We have seen instances on iPhones when Arable Mobile is in a constant loading state when coming from the background. These cases seem to be related to switching between wifi and cellular, or in low cellular signal conditions. This is being investigated further for a resolution in the next release.
  • On the Irrigation screen, users may see small differences between the daily and hourly precipitation data for tomorrow’s row. This will be reviewed for the next release.