My two units have fixed themselves with the new update. Will keep an eye on them.
Thanks team!
Hi @Taylordr61
Besides than the devices I mentioned the others should be fine. The relearning should normally only take a week if the device installation has good enough contact. We have updated our AI cloud yesterday so there should be improvement with the calibration. Please let us know if it still seems off to you after trying what was suggested.
Thank you for your patience
Al
Engineering
Hi @ebelew
337KYE had a rare edge case issue which seems to have gone away after the update. It seems to be functioning correctly now but please let us know if you see more problems.
Another issue with this device seems to be an UX issue which I would like to get some feedback
I believe you calibrate Max Moisture multiple times starting on May 6th because of the notification instructions.
One of the issue with the instructions you got was that it was a bit too severe in tone when it should have just been more as a recommendation. We will be tuning the wording better with different levels of severity.
Another issue is that it seems like when you set Max Moisture you did not “deep water” the soil. In the chart above, the purple bars are your Set Max Moisture attempts. The white line is the raw moisture value from the sensor. The blue line “real” moisture is the calibrate moisture based on the inputs. If we try to set the Max Moisture when the soil is not saturated the soil profile will not work properly, which resulted in the failure messages you saw a couple of days later after your first attempt. The Set Max Moisture function should walk you through the steps with saturating the soil. We have noticed this pattern for a number of users. I am curious if it is because the importance to water the soil to near saturation was not conveyed properly or that the notifications became confusing. My guess is that because you keep seeing the “Set Max Moisture” required message and you tried again because you were not sure if you set it or not?
Would you mind walking-through your process with Set Max Moisture?
Thank you for your help!
Al
Engineering
Sure when inset max moisture. I pour 2 gallons of water in and around the unit then hit max moisture
I can only tell you what I’m thinking. First I’m a System Admin so I do understand technical, networks, and modeling. AI, I don’t know, other than possibly, it’s an LLM that “learns” from data it finds or collects or both. I am NOT a programmer! I have Alpha and Beta tested my share of software through the years though.
To a point, I understand VWC (because I’ve seen/used it for years) but not the GeoDrops AI nor it’s relationship to VWC, if there is any. So I have to trust that when it (you guys) want me to do something, I do it. Because it is trying to learn my soil moisture (data collected) along with others data (data it might find). In my mind if (when I installed it) I set Max Moisture and it went to 100%, it saw a value. If it rains or I water and the value increases above the last “Max” value I set, it thinks there is a new “Max” and ask me to set it. Why it can’t just use that new max, I don’t know. It ask (told) me to set/reset the Max Moisture and I did.
My confusion came, recently, when it told me to reset it and I did. It did not go to 100% and ask me again, and again. Did I put water on it before I set it? No. Probably my bad, but when we get 1"-2" of rain, or I just watered that morning, I didn’t think I needed to. I assumed (my bad) that it saw an increased value of “max” and needed me to set it again.
A lot of this is trust, whether that is in your code or the GUI. If I am to continue to use this and “push it” to my friends I either need to understand it, or trust it and leave it alone, or a combination of both. As this grows it will take a lot of support personnel to explain all of this or a core group of real, every day users that help you.
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Hi @ebelew ,
Thank you for sharing your detailed feedback and perspective. I’ll let @homedigy-alpha answer your questions more thoroughly here including the timelines when this is fully fixed. I just wanted to reach out with this summary on the Release Tracker page in case this was missed.
Abnormal Max Moisture Calibration Alerts: Many users are seeing abnormal Max Moisture Calibration alerts and notifications popping up, even though the sensor readings seem perfectly accurate. This has been root-caused to two different bugs in our system (1 bug in notification pipeline, and 1 bug in BigData processing pipeline). This issue has been partially fixed on May 14.
Regarding the discussion about VWC, we will be explaining this more thoroughly in the upcoming user guide. For those following along the conversation, I would like to bring up this explainer in the meantime.
Thanks for your patience and feedback as we improve how this process operates.
Stanley
Marketing PM
Team GeoDrops
A post was split to a new topic: Battery Data Not Showing Up on App
As best I can tell, this post (that I’m replying to) is where the topic of multiple “set max moisture” alerts stands, which makes me think this an ongoing issue; is that correct? One issue is that when I get the “Action Required: Max Moisture Recalibration Required” alert and click on the “Get Started” link under the “Prepare soil” card, it has always taken me to a blank page, so I still don’t know what the best practice is for preparing the soil. It would also be very helpful for someone to disclose what actually has to happen for the alert to be triggered. Is it that it gets triggered anytime your soil sets a new record on raw moisture? Or is it more complex than that? Is it best to set it based on a real world scenerio or an artificial one? What I mean by that is, should I attempt to set it only after an irrigation or rain event or should I get a bucket and pour it over the sensor?
Hi @edneum2 ,
Thanks for the work in getting us the screenshots. We are in the process of making the app communication to the user more intuitive. An engineer would respond with more details as they become available. We’re also working on a knowledge base to answer many of the questions in the future.
As far as I know regarding the soil preparation, the goal is to make sure that it’s wet enough (for the finger test) while leaving them as undisturbed as possible (although not realistic for clay or rocky soils; we do have different installation videos for different soil types as well). Then the app would ask you to slice enough of an opening to make room for the battery compartment, leaving the soil between the probes be as undisturbed as possible (this minimizes required settling time before the readings start being useful). The app would then notify you on when it’s ready for “Learn Max Moisture” and then it should be set.
Best,
Stanley
Marketing PM
Team GeoDrops
3 of my 4 sensors (the 3 placed in turf; the one that had been saying it wouldn’t settle is in a bed) have been settled and working fine for a decent amount of time. If you look at my most recent group of 4 screenshots it would make you think that what’s prompting the set max moisture again is the fact that moisture profiles are significantly lower than what the sensor had been seeing a couple weeks ago when we were getting a lot of rain. So in other words it does NOT look like the sensor is saying “whoa where is all the new max moisture coming from? You need to reset it because you previously set it when the soil had a much greater potential to hold more moisture”; it looks like it’s saying “despite your irrigation I’m still seeing consistently lower moisture levels, so maybe just reset your max moisture because somehow a few weeks ago I thought your soil had a greater potential to hold moisture than your last few irrigation events have demonstrated.” That’s why I’m wondering if it’s actually NOT an experimental max moisture that it wants; I’m thinking maybe the sensors want a more real world type of max moisture? Ie don’t pour a bucket of water over the sensor then set max moisture, instead just give it a good irrigation event and then set it; Ie it seems like it’s possible to set max moisture when it’s too wet?
In the graph of device 33788P, it made it look my most recent reset of the max moisture was executed when the soil was dry, but I guess the moisture level just hadn’t been updated yet. Here is the graph a day later showing where the moisture level was when I did the last reset
Sorry for the flood of information. Maybe we could just get an engineer to say A or B: A) GeoDrops is only going to require resetting the max moisture when it detects a higher level of moisture than it has seen before or B) There is a such thing as setting the max moisture when there’s too much moisture in the soil
Same here. Been running 3 devices for 2 months now. Front, Side, and Back. Back (336Q7M) has the action required message for the last few days. I’d much prefer to not touch the device. All of the data has been awesome. I’d rather it just reset the max if it detects a higher moisture level. I feed the data from all 3 devices into ChatGPT twice daily (9am and 9pm) and I only care about the high surface temperature for the day, the 3 temperature levels, and the 3 raw moisture levels. I use those 7 data items daily for all analysis and decisions. Great device!
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Hi @edneum2 ,
Thanks for all the screenshots and details. @homedigy-lawrence will investigate this further and get back to you soon.
Stanley
Marketing PM
Team GeoDrops
Thanks for the enthusiastic questions. Please keep them coming. We love it when people actually use GeoDrops to its full capabilities. 
First of all, it looks like we have a software bug in the Notifications system. Specifically, low-priority Set Max Moisture suggestions in our software code is being treated the same as a high-priority Set Max Moisture alert. @homedigy-alpha has found the root-cause of this bug and is fixing it as I type this response. This seems to be affecting quite a number of users, and is affecting both @edneum2 and @Sixto .
Next, let me answer some of the questions in this thread:
Re: graph update
In the graph of device 33788P, it made it look my most recent reset of the max moisture was executed when the soil was dry, but I guess the moisture level just hadn’t been updated yet. Here is the graph a day later showing where the moisture level was when I did the last reset
[Lawrence]: Yes, please give it a bit of time. The graph data are updated two times:
- First time is a real-time sensor update. As soon as the Droplet device updates sensor data ~3 hours or so, you’ll see the update on the dashboard and in the App.
- Second time is a comprehensive sensor re-update (every half a day or so, the time-series sensor vector data are re-evaluated as an ensemble). A new, more accurately calibrated sensor reading values are then produced by the AI pipeline, and overwrites the less accurate data in step 1 above.
Note that the difference between update 1 and update 2 above are typically very small (so most people can’t tell the difference, unless you’re doing science experiments and want very accurate moisture readings). The only time you see a big difference is if there’s a major calibration event, and that the newly calibrated soil characteristics are quite different than before.
Re: How calibration works
Maybe we could just get an engineer to say A or B: A) GeoDrops is only going to require resetting the max moisture when it detects a higher level of moisture than it has seen before or B) There is a such thing as setting the max moisture when there’s too much moisture in the soil
[Lawrence]: The GeoDrops Ap actually has a tiny question “mark icon” that if you click on it, it’ll explain a bit more of what’s going on. I’m also in the middle of wirting a pretty comprehensive Knowledge Base (since our AI software does a lot of work, and there are implications of how to best calibrate). I’m getting close, so please hold on just a bit longer.
To elaborate on what AI does for max moisture calib:
- With the latest AI learning algorithm, you no longer need to keep clicking on the “Set Max Moisture” everytime it rains or you think the soil’s max moisture saturation point (aka Field Capacity) point has changed.
- Our AI algorithm can now, for the most part, perform track small amounts of field capacity changes over time pretty accurately.
- The only time when you need to manually click on “Set Max Moisture” is when you’re very sure your soil is relatively well saturated, but the soil moisture percentage reported is less than 90%.
- Or, when AI generated a QC status (which gets translated to an App Notification) that Set Max Moisture is recommended becasue AI thinks it’s starting to loose confidence whether it’s still tracking the Max Moisture value accurately.
So, to summarize and to quickly answer your question:
- A) GeoDrops is only going to require resetting the max moisture when it detects a higher level of moisture than it has seen before
- [Ans]: Nope, not needed for higher moisture. AI auto-recalibrates and almost always (>99% of the time) gets this right by itself.
- [Ans]: Nope, not needed for higher moisture. AI auto-recalibrates and almost always (>99% of the time) gets this right by itself.
- B) There is a such thing as setting the max moisture when there’s too much moisture in the soil
- [Ans]: Not sure if I’m reading this right, but if you’re question about how AI handles over-saturation (ie, too much water that there’s a small puddle forming above), it usually gets this right by itself too. You only re-calibrate manually if your soil is indeed pretty wet, and AI reports <90% soil moisture!
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In addition what @homedigy-lawrence said, one thingI need to emphasize is that currently some messages are a bit over aggressive in wording for cases that are less severe and does not require immediate action, such as @edneum2 's “Carpe Mrtyle” and “Back Yard (mid)”. While it doesn’t hurt to tell the AI to relearn the max moisture frequently, in his case that was not necessary for the device continue to function correctly and should have been more of a recommendation to improve sensor accuracy.
Our sensors are quite accurate and would continuously check for the quality of data and these recommendation would show up every now and then. Specifically in the aforementioned example, the device’s detected some fluctuation in the top level of the soil’s max moisture capacity. However it was not significant enough to deteriorate the accuracy of the readings.
The wording of these notifications are being fixed right now, please bare with us for a bit and hopefully the user experience will improve.
Al
Engineering
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Hi all,
Here is an update. We just roll out another patch. It’s still not entirely fixed and it will take us maybe a couple of more days.
The patch includes some fixes to the AI detection as well as toning down and reducing overly aggressive notifications. We are still working on fixing the user experience in the app and are creating a more comprehensive guide so the setup process can be clearer and easy to understand especially with newer users who are not familiar with GeoDrops and why it is necessary to do all these calibrations.
Thank you for bearing with us. I will keep updating on the progress we make.
Al
Engineering
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Thanks for the update. I’m still seeing the message for 336Q7M but will wait to see if it goes away before doing anything.
I also installed 2 more GeoDrops yesterday, so now I have a total of 5. I updated all my BigQuery reports so all is great here with data for the 5 GeoDrops.
I feed ChatGPT the prior day 24 hours of data for all sensors (5 now), along with the current day hourly data. I do this at 9am and 11pm, always an interesting analysis and perspective. It literally takes less than a minute to save the data and get the ChatGPT analysis for the entire property.
Here’s hoping that Team GeoDrop has a long and successful future!
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