Arable Release Notes

Release Date: December 4, 2020

Instance affected: Production

Hostnames: arable.arable.com

Browsers: IE 11, Chrome 86, Firefox 82, Edge 86, Safari 13.1/12.1, iPad 12/13

Type of Release: Minor

Version: 8.2.3

Release Overview

Arable Web 8.2.3 is a maintenance release that augments the minor release 8.2.0. Among other things, this release expands functionality of the Growing Season and Alert features introduced in the prior release. 

The Growing Season function now infills and backfills temperature data for the GDD calculation with remote-sensed data if the Arable Mark was not deployed throughout the season. A set of standard growth stage models for particular crop types and varietals have also been preloaded in the system in order to minimize manual data entry. These can be adapted or modified in the Growth Stage table after initialization. 

The Alert function has been enhanced with two new alerts: Device Tilt and New Location. These will help to identify early on if a Mark and its associated pole have shifted from their vertical position. The new location alert will give an immediate indication of a successful deployment. Both new alerts can be subscribed to by either mobile push, SMS or voice call. 

The Arable Web Graph-Time functionality now allows any combination of measurement types in a comparative graph, even when selecting multiple locations (up to 10). Hourly data toggles have been added for several measurement types, including precipitation and temperature. A cumulative view of precipitation has also been included in the measurement drop-down.

A sensor data processing update enhances both remote-sensed wind data and data from the connected Davis 6410 anemometer. The short-term (first hour) forecast for precipitation and temperature has been improved by combining the current 15-min reading with forecasted 15-min readings for the current hour. Both of these changes will help with the overall accuracy of the data shown in Arable Web. 

Finally, you will see some other updates in terms of new banner summary pages, pending teams invite info modals, and updated export functionality. 

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

• Two new device alerts have been added, and can be subscribed to by mobile push, SMS or voice call:
  • Device Tilt: Default triggered when the device registers at >10° angle from vertical for at least 3 hours. An Org Admin can modify the angle threshold between 0° to 45°, though the time duration hysteresis is fixed.
  • New Location: Triggered any time a new deployment location is generated. The user subscribes to this alert along with the previous Inactive Location alert.
• We have made several improvements to the Growing Season feature and its associated GDD calculations. If you were delayed in deploying your Mark until after your season started, the system will now use remote-sensed temperature data for the GDD calculation. The system now also contains more crop-varietal pairs, some of which have newly defined default growth stages. If you are still missing a crop-varietal pair, Customer Success can help assess GDD temperature thresholds and load it into the system for you, and also can share a more complete document on our default data settings and sources.
  There is a new banner on the Seasons page that gives essential summary statistics that can be used to identify, e.g.:
  • Locations unassigned to a current Growing Season
  • Count of current, completed and upcoming Seasons
  • Seasons with undefined Growth Stages
• We have also improved ind data accuracy and presentation with Arable Web 8.2.3. The local wind direction calculation now uses a polynomial regression model function on the incoming voltage. Remote-sensed wind speed is now converted from 10m to 2m height to be comparable with local wind speed data. Remote-sensed data is shown if there are any abnormal readings from local wind (0 or > 80 km/h) as a safeguard for errors. The wind graph has also an explanatory popup message if there are any data gaps. Several improvements have been made in firmware to improve local wind data even further (see firmware release notes).
• The short-term (first hour) forecast for precipitation and temperature have been improved by combining the current 15-min reading with forecasted 15-min readings for the current hour. This will show up on the Location Details Weather page.
• Hourly precipitation and temperature have been added to Arable Web Graph to provide more granular data access and information on the current day. Now, all measurements on the graph page have a toggle to change between hourly and daily time ranges. A drop-down selector and graph now present cumulative precipitation for a specific range. The start date selected in the calendar will be the starting point for the summation.
• The Arable Web 8.2.3 Graph-Time tab now has a slider for the soil moisture graphs so that the user can more easily zoom in and out. The location selector drop-down in both Graph and Export have been improved to load faster.
• The Arable Web Graph-Time tab allows users to compare soil moisture levels with other measurements and to compare soil moisture levels for multiple locations. The average for all soil moisture depths are used in this case. A future roadmap item is planned to allow selectable depths of interest for the averaging function.
• On the same Arable Web Graph-Time tab, users are now able to select any two measurements, along with up to 10 locations, for display in both the graph and the table (also available as PDF and CSV exports). Note the addition of GDD to the measurement list. The GDD calculation is dependent on the user defining a Growing Season.
• Permission management of the Analytics dashboards is now so granular that Arable can help publish dashboards to specific Teams. Arable Customer Success can also help to designate a dashboard during publishing so that it only shows up in Mobile or Web. Note that we still have a roadmap item to have the Org-Team selector limit the device control drop-downs in the actual dashboards. For now, this selection will need to be done manually as all devices visible to the user will be shown.
• The standard Analytics dashboards will no longer show up as their own Organization, but will instead be represented as tabs alongside custom dashboards for the Org-Team selected.
  There are two new standard dashboards related to single and multi-site benchmarking introduced in this release which contain specific tabs for water, weather and plant analysis. The dashboards have controls for device ID or location name selection, as well as start and stop dates. There are also controls for selecting field capacity and refill point for soil moisture graphs. There are drill-down options when clicking on a graph to see monthly, weekly or daily analysis. Follow the links above to learn more in-depth about these two dashboards.
• Arable Web has been stylized with new backgrounds for the login page as well as with new Alert, Season and Team summary banner backgrounds. The Graph-Time component has been refactored to get better overall performance.
• The Arable Web 8.2.3 user interface has been improved. All the icons on the map have been replaced with SVG from PNG for a cleaner UI look. Some components have also been rearranged. For example, now the hide/show Team button is aligned to the right of the table on the Teams page, and the Time/Rank toggle buttons are centered. For the Graph page, the location badge will not appear when there is only one location selected. Finally, some actions in the Growth Stage table of the Seasons page have been grouped in ellipsis menus.
• The Arable Web Export function is also updated to contain more than one location, including historical location data if a device has moved to a new location. Export also has the capability to include daily and cumulative GDD units if a Growing Season is defined. Cumulative precipitation is now also available in the Export. Finally, the data dictionary has been improved and made more accessible as a PDF download from the Export page.

Defect Fixes

• When a user searches in Export and the Graph-Time drop-down for locations using device ID as a search parameter, it showed correct locations at first but then in a few seconds expanded the list to more locations. This was fixed in Arable Web 8.2.3.
• Temperature thresholds used in the crop-varietal calculation on the Growing Season tab displayed in Celsius even if Fahrenheit was selected in version 8.2.0. This is now corrected in 8.2.3.
• Crop-varietals were not ordered alphabetically in the drop-down when creating a Growing Season in version 8.2.0. This is now corrected in 8.2.3.
• Export showed, in rare cases, invalid data entry for an hourly row in version 8.2.0. This happened when observed and remote-sensed data did not overlap in time. This has now been corrected in version 8.2.3.
• Remote-sensed wind data took some time to process before being presented in Arable Web 8.1.0, which could lead to up to 6 hours of wind data not being available at the time of reading. A new enhancement has now been implemented that provides current, remote-sensed, on-demand data to fill this gap up to the last hour.
• The Arable Web Plant tab used different input data for ETc and precipitation charts, which could make the day delineation confusing to the user. A better explanation has now been added in the info modals associated with these charts:
  • Precipitation for today is built up using hourly observations up to the current hour and with a remote-sensed forecast for the subsequent hours of the day. Today is categorized as partly observed data.
  • ETc, on the other hand, only changes to observed data after the day is completed; the values shown for today are forecasted data.
• The Arable Web Map view did not contain precipitation for the current day in the 10-day historical precipitation measurement. This has been resolved.
• The Mark 2 marker on the Map could previously show as 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.
• Labels for today’s temperature on the Location Details Weather tab have been updated so they match the condition, e.g., “Freezing and Dry.”
• The login error message that shows up when a user attempts to sign in with a non-existing user ID has been updated.
• The description in the hourly forecast info modal for the Location Details Weather tab has been updated to avoid user confusion related to minimum hourly and daily temperature calculations.
• It was previously possible to make multiple requests to save a Season. This is now being handled in the frontend to avoid duplication.
• The Export and Graph drop-down showed only active locations in Arable Web 8.1.0. Now both historical and current active locations are available to select.
• In the previous release, it was not possible to search for a location in the drop-down list when creating a new season. A search function similar to what existed already in Export and the Graph-Time drop-down has been added in the 8.2.3 release.
• After having sent out an invitation to one or more users via the Arable Web Teams invite feature, it was not possible to see a confirmation that the invited user has received the email. Now View Team shows a “pending invites” button, which will pop up an info modal with the list of users that have not yet accepted their invite.
• On the Teams page, the Arable Web app will only show the last login value to Org Admins users and not to other team members.
• The layout for the battery info modal in the Location Details page has been updated and now contains the same battery status thresholds as the info modal on the Devices page.
• The maximum length for a location name in Arable Web 8.1.0 was 20 characters. We have now changed this to 30 characters in the 8.2.3 release.
• It was not possible to see and select dormant devices in the Export dropdown selector; this has now been resolved in the 8.2.3 release.

Known Issues

• While the Export page drop-down shows the end date of an historical location (inactive/dormant) in parentheses, this date is not shown in Graph-Time. This will be fixed in the next release.
• We have seen occasional “invalid data” gaps in the hourly CSV exports for historical wind. This is being reviewed and is planned to be resolved using a hotfix on top of Arable Web 8.2.3.
• The loading time for the Graph-Rank tab can be prolonged in certain circumstances (e.g., slow internet connection). It is planned to improve the performance in an upcoming release.
• We have seen occasional hourly shifts for precipitation historical data in the Hourly Forecast graph of the Location Details Weather tab. This is currently under review and we expect to make a hotfix for this shortly.
• We have seen occasional issues with confirming the selection of the location to be included when creating a new season. This is under review for an upcoming hotfix. In the meantime, the issue gets resolved when refreshing the browser page.
• Wind data as shown on the Arable Web Map page is the average for today. This is planned to be changed in a future release to current wind in order to be more actionable.
• The Web UI for the Map and Settings pages does not explain to the user whether GPS is missing for a Mark (e.g., that it is temporarily deployed indoors). An info modal is planned for a future release to tell the user to move the Mark into GPS coverage (i.e., outdoors) and potentially to allow manual entry of the GPS coordinates for prolonged deployment inside.
• To enable confirmation of successful soil moisture probe installation in real time, we plan to add Bridge status as part of the deployment message from the Mark to the backend, and have it populate in the API and UI (on the Devices page).
• Sorting by last sync on the Devices page may show pending device locations at the top, regardless of sort order. This will be fixed in an upcoming release.
• Frost and heat alerts are currently triggered based on the max/min 5-minute value of the hour. A hysteresis of 2°C above the threshold has to be achieved before another alert would be triggered again. This means that one 5-min anomaly value could lead to a retriggering of the alert. An improved algorithm for the min/max temp that uses, e.g., the average of the top five 5-min values, is being assessed for an upcoming release.
• Currently the NDVI graph does not show any indication that a drop can be due to cloudy days. To circumvent any misunderstandings, users can also review the solar radiation with the two-measurement graph feature.