Hi @Scythe
Thanks for your very detailed feedback, it’s amazing to see have all the amazing users like you contributing to the GeoDrops community!
I wanted to make sure all of your points are addressed before my reply, so sorry it took me a while.
See responses below!
Cheers,
Lawrence
Re: Hardware Quality
I’m glad you liked the hardware quality.
We worked so hard on both the engineering design and manufacturing QC & Test for it. 
Re: Soil Installation
+1 to your point that it makes a HUGE difference how carefully the sensor probes are installed into the soil.
- Good quality install = Stable soil moisture readings in ~1 week
- Poor quality install = Can take 1+ months before getting stable moisture readings
Do I dig down deep enough to create a cavity for the entirety of battery compartment or is it expected to create space for itself as we push it down?
[A]: Yes, the idea is actually to dig about as deep as the sensor probe, in order to have enough room for the battery compartment. For compacted (less aerated soil), the battery compartment’s “shape” won’t be able to push the soil away, and you may find yourself having difficulty pushing the device flush against the ground.
Do I backfill space around the battery compartment and sensor itself with the soil that I removed to get it into place?
[A]: Yes please, and try to make the soil as tight as possible. Once the device is flush against the ground, you can step on it with your entire body weight.
If I can’t seem to get the soil sensor to confirm a sensor lock, should I try to improve my install spot (filling in with soil, using more water to soften, etc.) or try another spot? I’ve got a bunch of divots in my lawn now from defaulting to the the latter =)
[A]: Next, yes it’s actually better to pick a new location.
I’ve been thinking. Do you mind watching this 1min GeoDrops installation video, and and let us know if you find it more useful than our App instructions:
We actually sent this video to our Beta users back then, and got mixed feedback. Some preferred reading quick bullet point text, and found this 1min video too long. Would love to get your take on this!
ps - The “small divots” created by the hand trowels (shovels) actually aren’t that much wider than core aeration holes, so they actually help loosen up and aerate your soil, and should naturally go away in about a month. 
pps - In parallel, @homedigy-leon is revisiting the whole installation instructions again and seeing how we can make the install instructions better.
Install language in the app specifies a specify a solid blue LED light, followed by green blinks. In practice, this is a solid green led followed by green blinks. Just a documentation bug.
[A]: Thanks for catching this! @homedigy-leon owns the entire App and will update in the next release.
Re: Interacting with Soil Moisture in GeoDrops App
Keep Insight Zoom level (1/2/4 week) setting across sessions, instead of resetting. Right now, I’m spending a lot of time at the 1 week granularity because I’m trying to give feedback on the watering events and the need to zoom down each time is annoying. Definitely still present the slider as a graphical hint to the user that the scale can be changed though. Perhaps also change the default zoom level setting dependent on the amount of time the device has been in service? (staying zoomed in for new devices, then shifting out by default as more data is available).
Fix odd “stretching” graphical behavior for water (possibly during training periods before max water calibration?) in insight view
[A]: Thanks for these feedback! We’ve seen people who preferred this other way around too, we’ll keep your feedback in mind!
Data for previous day “disappears” regularly (at least the date is gone, although the graph is still present). It does appear later - perhaps an indication of some type of batch processing?
[A]: Yes, there’re multiple tiers of batched processing in order to lower the cost of running Cloud AI Learning – it’s just so expensive to run!
As part of the large irrigation control Cloud software release, we’re actually in the middle of moving to a new data pipeline architecture where the pipelined data updates are done in smaller increments so this will look more seamless for everyone.
The only thing we unfortunately cannot work around are historic weather data. Weather forecast data are always there, but historic “observed” weather data (not forecasted data) can often take up to 12 hours or more to show up and get consolidated into our BigData database.
Is it possible to indicate to the user when they’ve already submitted feedback on specific segments via Insights? I’m submitting feedback on watering, but find myself not sure which events I’ve already submitted feedback for and don’t want to confuse the model. Maybe highlight the submitted segment in green/red depending on whether it’s valid or invalid feedback?
Add drop-down fields for timeline feedback - finger-based time highlighting is intuitive, but also imprecise as it usually shifts by a couple of hours when you take your finger off the screen. Makes it challenging to submit precise feedback for model training.
[A]: These are great suggestions! We may include this in our next updated “user feedback UI update”. @homedigy-leon
Provide method to get back into soil sensing mode from the app? Several times during installation, I’d see the sensor pop out of soil sensing mode indicating that it had found a soil lock, but I knew from just touching the sensor that it wouldn’t stay where it was. In these situations, removing the battery cover to get back into soil sensing mode is annoying and risks debris incursion (since the sensor had just been in the ground). It seems like you’ve got hooks for something similar in the app (Move Device/Relearn Soil Profile), but the instructions (as I recall them) indicate that we should pop the battery cover.
[A]: Another great suggestion, this one is actually a bit hard to do, but we will keep this in mind!
Should we be providing feedback on rain as well as watering to help train the model?
[A]: Great question. Feedback on inaccurate rain data unfortunately are NOT as useful, since we get these weather data directly from Official NWS Database – Our government provides really precise weather forecast down to Zip code level, and we currently don’t have plans to do our own AI Training to detect and improve weather forecast data directly from NWS
Re: Soil Science and Data API
Support for syringing (is this another name for pulse watering?) along with canopy temperature.
I, like many others, am hopeful for Home Assistant support. One way to potentially facilitate this at a relatively low power cost and (hopefully) lower development time would be to use BLE broadcasts that can be picked up and decoded by the Home Assistant Bluetooth proxy integration.
I leverage this to monitor the temperature/humidity of 9 (small) greenhouses in my house via Govee hygrometers and use that data along with PlantMonitor/OpenPlantbook to check for plants that may be outside of acceptable humidity/temperature ranges. Home Assistant automatically detects the Govee BT broadcast after it powers on and prompts me to add the device to my setup. More details here: GitHub - custom-components/ble_monitor: BLE monitor for passive BLE sensors. Just an idea.
[A]: Thanks for sharing this! We’ll actually actively working on a Google Cloud BigData access API, hopefully we can make it live within a month or so. I’m hoping people in our community can help write a Home Assistant plugin for it.
There;s also a public dashboard coming, so people can directly view their histric soil moisture data on a large browser on their computer, instead of the tiny phone screen.
Also, instead of BLE, we’re actually working on a proprietary BTLR-based protocol in the background for the upcoming GeoDrops Station. You can find a bit more info about the GeoDrops Station on our website’s specs page here (We finally updating and porting all the Kickstarter and older contents to our new website 2 days ago):
Support for calculating AWC to improve performance in 3rd party apps (like Rachio). You reference that you’re not actually calculating this here though: Grass Moisture Experences - #4 by @homedigy-lawrence and I recognize this may be considered a competitive disadvantage to facilitate.
[A]: Actually it’s the opposite, we have spent so much time and effort to create something we think is better. I ended up wirting a seperate post for it just now. Can you take a look and let me know what you think?
See link below: