What's new in Yardstick

Combine in the map editor could still be pressed while Yarbo was working

It joins two zones on the robot straight away, and it was missing from the lock the editor applies during a job. It now grays out with everything else. The editor's help panel also gains an entry explaining how Combine works.

Fall Cleanup and Spring Up for every robot on the property

They used to reach only your first robot. Each robot now keeps its own season: the height it is working toward, the height it started at, and the zones you leave out. When you have more than one robot, a picker under the title switches between them, and the button on the map opens the season for the robot you are looking at. A season you have already started stays with your first robot.

On installations with more than one core, moving the aerial photo looked like it did nothing

You dragged the photo to line it up with your yard, pressed Save, and it jumped straight back to where it started. The move had been saved every time. What had not changed was the address your browser uses to ask for the picture, so the browser redrew the copy it already had instead of fetching the newly positioned one. A hard refresh showed the photo exactly where you had put it, which is how two owners found it between them. The address now changes whenever the photo moves, so the picture follows the drag straight away.

Restore in the map editor still worked while Yarbo was mowing

The editor locks while a job is running, but the Restore button on a backup was left out of that lock, so a click could have replaced your map in the middle of the job. Restore now locks with everything else, and Yardstick itself refuses any map change while that robot is working, even from a page opened before the job started. Thanks to the owner who spotted it.

The map now draws your robot's track at the width of the mower

The track used to be drawn as a thin line, which made the robot look like it was wandering: the small differences between one pass and the next showed up as long thin wedges across your zones. The mower cuts a 20 inch strip, and the track is now drawn at that width, so it shows the ground the blades actually covered. Nothing about what is recorded has changed, so every recording you already have redraws this way straight away, including ones from months back.

The map also now shows the grass left between passes and the ring around each tree and post, which a thin line could not.

A note when you open Yardstick in a browser it does not support

Yardstick is built and tested for Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers. Elsewhere some things quietly do not work, and Align photo is the worst of them: it appears to save and then loses your adjustment. The map now says so at the top of the page, once, and you can dismiss it for good.

A 4G data saver

If your robot has no Wi-Fi and runs on its own 4G SIM with a monthly data cap, turn on Settings, Recording, 4G data saver. Yardstick then asks your robot for nothing while it sleeps on its dock, and takes one reading every 20 seconds while it works instead of one every second. The path on the map is drawn from fewer points, so coverage and area-cut figures are rougher. It is off unless you turn it on.

On some Macs, signing in to your Yarbo account failed with a certificate error

The email and password were accepted, and then the connection to the robot stopped with "certificate verify failed". The Mac version was looking for its list of trusted certificate authorities in a place that exists on some Macs and not on others. It now carries its own and uses it for every connection. Windows and Linux were never affected. If you hit this, install this version over the top and sign in again; nothing else is needed.

Yardstick could stay connected to your robot and quietly stop hearing it

Everything looked normal, but no readings arrived and the map stopped filling in. Yardstick now notices a connection that has gone silent and rebuilds it on its own. A docked robot really does go quiet for long stretches, and that is not this, so nothing is disturbed while your robot is parked.

The driven path was drawn as a smear instead of lines

Zoomed in, the robot's track stopped looking like passes. It draws as lines at every zoom level now.

A Controller button that led nowhere

Manual driving was removed earlier, but a few links to it remained and opened a page that no longer exists. They are gone. The Settings panel that owned them is now called Robot commands, because that is what its switch controls: whether this computer may start, pause, resume, stop or dock the robot.

Opening the map on a long recording used far more memory than it needed

The map now reads its history in pages, so memory no longer grows with the size of your recording.

Daily summaries were skipped for a robot that had never had a GPS fix

Hours worked, area, battery and faults are now written down for every robot you record.

Pages were slower than they needed to be

Settings, the alerts panel and the map all did work on every visit that they only needed to do once. Settings opens in a blink now, and going back to the map from it is immediate.

The map could be rebuilt from scratch for no reason

Whenever Yardstick reconnected to your robot it fetched the yard map again and treated it as changed even when nothing had moved, which threw away everything it had worked out about your yard. A map that has not changed is now left alone.

On a wide screen, the wall display's photo and your robot did not agree

The robot's dot could sit to one side of where the machine actually was. The photo and the dot now use the same frame.

Each alert now says how it reached you

The list of what Yardstick has told you carries a column for every alert: emailed you, sent to your phone, shown on the map, or which channel failed and why.

Fault codes are named the way the Yarbo app names them

A planning fault now reads, for example, "WP016, Unable to Navigate Obstacle" alongside the number, so what Yardstick says and what the app says are visibly the same event.

The map page shows what Yardstick has told you, including alerts that resolved on their own

A warning that cleared itself used to vanish without a trace. Now there is a list under the map with when it started, what it said and how long it lasted, and it survives restarting Yardstick.

Silence a fault code you have already dealt with

Settings lists every fault code your robot has reported and lets you stop alerting on one you know about, without turning off the rule. Everything is still recorded; only the notification stops.

The map editor remembers which layers you left on

Turn the aerial photo, or any other layer, off and it stays off the next time you open the editor on that computer. The throwing and blowing direction layers follow whichever head is fitted.

Select and Move are separate tools in the map editor

A click meant to select a zone can no longer nudge it. Moving is its own tool, and after a move Yardstick tells you how far the shape went and that Ctrl+Z puts it back.

Job emails give the area in square feet and acres as well as square meters

The same links at the top of every page

The map, Plans, Schedule, the map editor, the wall display and Settings appear in the same order with the same names wherever you are.

A time of day on the map's date filter

From and To take a time as well as a date, so you can look at today between 1pm and 3pm. Leave the times empty and nothing changes.

Recordings are kept for ninety days, and the raw status originals for one day

If you never changed these, Yardstick was keeping every position forever. Your daily summaries, maps, map history, alerts and sessions are kept either way, and if you already chose your own windows, your choice stands. Both windows are in Settings under Storage.

Yardstick now reaches your robot through your Yarbo account

Yarbo publishes an official, supported way for software to talk to your robot: the same one the Yarbo app itself uses. Yardstick used to connect to your Core directly over your own network instead, and it has now moved to the supported method, using the account you already sign in to for the map editor. Sign in once under Settings and everything carries on as before: recording, the map, alerts, the scheduler, starting a plan by hand, and sending the robot back to its dock. Your password stays on your own computer, and it is never sent to us.

Setting up is now signing in

The first screen after installing asks for your Yarbo account instead of hunting for the robot on your network. Your machines come from the account, so there is nothing to search for and no address to type. In Settings, "Find another robot" now checks your Yarbo account for a machine you have added since.

A clear prompt when Yardstick needs your Yarbo sign-in

If Yardstick is not signed in, or Yarbo stops accepting the saved password, the home page and the phone view ask you to sign in instead of showing a map that has stopped updating, and a critical alert goes out by banner, phone and email. A dropped internet connection does not count, so it will not ask for a password that is fine. Signing in again starts recording straight away, and nothing already recorded is lost.

An alert when the robot goes back to charge before a job is finished

"Went back to charge mid-job" says the job is not done and names the program, so a long plan that stops for a charge no longer looks like one that ended. Off unless you switch it on under Alerts, like Job started and Job finished. It reads the robot's own suspended-job flag, which is set for a charge and not for a pause from the Yarbo app.

Removed: the drive pad

Steering the robot by hand is gone. It worked by sending a continuous stream of commands over your own network, where a missed one stopped the machine within a second; over an internet connection that promise cannot be kept, and the command it would delay is the one that stops the robot. Everything else you could do from that page is unchanged and still there: start a plan, pause, resume, stop, and send it back to the dock.

Removed: Blades and Blower speed from Home Assistant

The same reason as the drive pad: turning them off now travels over the internet and could arrive late. Starting a plan, pausing, resuming, stopping and sending the robot to the dock from Home Assistant are unchanged. Update the Yardstick integration to 0.2.2 and delete the two entities it leaves behind.

Form fields were hard to see in the dark theme

Text boxes and dropdowns were drawn one shade off the card behind them, with an outline that all but vanished, so an empty box looked like empty space. They now have their own fill and a clearly visible outline in both dark and light.

The Scheduler called a charging break a stop

A plan the robot parked to charge part way through was logged as "stopped part way". It now says the robot went back to the dock to charge, and a job paused out in the yard says it was paused.

An open map page downloaded the whole map every 20 seconds, even when nothing had changed and even when nobody was looking at it

The page now tells Yardstick which version of the map it already has, and gets a few bytes back instead of the whole map when the robot has recorded nothing new, which is most of the day for a robot on its dock. Every live panel also pauses while the page is in a background tab or the screen is asleep, and catches up the moment it is shown again.

The Slope map layer was upside down

Steep ground was drawn in the pale colors and flat ground in the dark ones, the reverse of what its legend says ("darker is higher"). The slope figures themselves were right; only the coloring was flipped. Steeper ground is now darker, as the legend says. The field reference also said a negative pitch meant nose-down; measured against the robot's own GPS altitude, it is the other way round, and the reference now says so.

Skip on a Scheduler program failed

Pressing Skip to pass over a program's next run raised an error instead of skipping it, so the program ran as usual. It now skips the next run, including for a program that repeats every few days.

NOAA rain could read the wrong total

With NOAA chosen as the weather source, the rain figure is taken from a radar service that answers with several totals at once (the last hour, 3 hours, 24 hours, 3 days and so on). Yardstick took the total in a fixed position and treated it as the last 24 hours, but the service does not keep its totals in a fixed order, so the figure could be a 12 hour or 3 day total instead. A rain rule on a conditional no-go zone could close a zone after a day with little or no rain. The 24 hour total is now found by its name, and if the answer cannot be matched Yardstick treats it as no reading, which leaves the zone where it is rather than guessing.

"Job finished" could arrive the moment a new job started

It quoted the size of the job before, because the robot's first report on a new plan can repeat the last job's completion. A finish now counts only when it closes a job Yardstick saw running.

On a new install, scheduled programs never ran

A robot added through your Yarbo account has no network address, and the Scheduler, its broken-plan check and the automatic stop when a robot leaves its map all skipped any robot without one. Installs updated from an earlier version still had an address saved, which hid it.

Yardstick worked your disk harder than it needed to

Drawing the map, framing the aerial photo, checking mowing direction and building the fault list all reread far more of your recording than they needed to, every time. It grew with how much you had recorded, so a new install never noticed and a long running one felt it in slow pages and a busy disk. All of it now reads only what is new, the map and the aerial framing survive a restart instead of being rebuilt from scratch, and the background panels stay warm only while someone is looking at a page.

The plan editor could undo a rename

Opening Edit areas left every other button on the page working, so you could scroll up and rename the same plan while the editor was still open. Saving the editor then put the old name back, because it was still holding its own copy of the plan. The editor now opens directly under the plan you are changing, and the other plan buttons are switched off until you save or cancel. Renaming a plan works the same way.

Some plans could not be deleted

Deleting a plan could leave it in place, most often after plans had been restored from a backup, because the restore wrote them back out of order. Yardstick now keeps your plans in order when it restores, deletes or edits them, so a delete does what you asked. You may notice the Yarbo app now lists your plans in number order. If a change still does not take, the note on the Plans page says what the robot answered.

The area list in the plan editor ran together

Each area's checkbox, name and size were jammed into one line, as "Back Field1676 m²", instead of being spaced out with the size on the right.

Weather rules were not offered on NOAA or MET Norway

The weather itself worked and showed on the home page, and a rule would have read its rain correctly, but the Scheduler page only counted a Tempest as weather. It kept the New weather rule button disabled and asked you to connect a weather station you did not need. It now offers rules for whichever source is on. The same check also went the other way: with weather switched off but a Tempest's details still saved, rules were offered that could never act. They are not offered now.

The map under the radar was too dark to read

Roads, towns and lakes were a wash of gray-brown you had to lean in to make out. The lines are drawn partly transparent where they are thin, and dimming the whole layer on top of that faded them twice. They are now drawn at full strength, and the water is neutral instead of orange.

Delete plan is no longer inside Edit areas

A plan is deleted from the Delete button on its own row, so there is one way to do it.

The wall radar now shows weather instead of insects

Radar draws whatever the beam hits, and close to an antenna at dusk that is insects and birds. They arrive as a solid green disc centered on the radar site, and three of them were on screen at once on a clear September evening, reading as three storms. Yardstick now asks NOAA for the version of the same radars with the non-weather returns already removed. Rain and snow look the same as before; the phantom storms are gone. The parts of the United States outside the lower 48 keep the older picture, because the filtered one does not reach them.

The wall fills the screen

The property photo and the radar were drawn in a squarish box with black down both sides of a widescreen television. Both now cover the whole screen, and they do it by showing more ground rather than by stretching or cropping: your property is never cut off to make it fit, and the detail is the same. Yardstick works out the shape of the screen it is on, so an ultrawide or a portrait panel fills too.

The wall display ignored a photo you had moved by hand

Align photo corrected the map view and the map editor but not the wall, so an owner who had lined his picture up still saw the old placement on that one screen, with the top of his property running off the edge of the photo onto bare background. Reported by the owner Align was built for, hours after he used it. The wall now follows your alignment. A property with more than one core is the exception and still takes none, because one picture cannot carry two corrections and applying one would put the other core's robot in the wrong place.

Deleting a no-go zone and the rule that used it left Yardstick trying to tidy it up forever

Smart no-go zones let a rule turn a zone on and off, and Yardstick puts a zone back off when the rule that turned it on goes away. If the zone had been deleted too there was nothing left to write, so the attempt failed and came round again thirty seconds later. On the recording box that had been running for at least 21 hours, reading the whole zone list every time, and filling the log file so the rest of the history rotated away about every seven hours. Nothing was visible on screen. A zone that was deleted along with its rule is now recognized as finished business and forgotten. A zone a rule still names but that is missing from your map is a different problem, so that one is left alone, retried once an hour, and you get a notice naming it so you can fix the rule or put the zone back.

Build, rename, change and delete your plans in Yardstick

The Plans page now has a New plan button, and Rename, Edit areas and Delete on every plan. Deleting always takes two presses, and the first one tells you which plan it is about to remove; clicking anywhere else cancels it. If one of your programs runs that plan, Yardstick names the program and makes you say so again. Rename happens right there in the row, so changing one word takes one click and the Enter key. Edit areas opens a picker of the areas on your map. Renaming a plan never affects your programs: they remember which plan by its identity, not by its name, and read the current name back from the robot whenever they need to say it.

Everything it needs was already there and the reason it had never been built was a misunderstanding on our side: a plan is a name and a list of areas that already exist, not something that needs drawing. Creating and deleting were proven on a real robot before any of this was written.

A few things it will not do. It will not change a plan while Yarbo is working, for the same reason the map editor will not move a zone mid-job. It takes a copy of all your plans immediately before every change, so there is always something to go back to. And it checks the robot afterwards rather than trusting that the change was accepted, because on this connection a write can report failure and still have landed.

Editing needs your Yarbo account, because changing a plan travels down the same connection the map editor uses, and the page now asks rather than quietly leaving the buttons out. Say no and it stays read only and never asks again; there is a small "Sign in to edit plans" link in the corner if you change your mind. It is the same sign-in the map editor and the scheduler already use, so if you have signed in to either you are already done.

After moving the satellite photo by hand, part of the map had nothing behind it

Align photo slid the picture but still fetched it for the same patch of ground, so whatever you slid it away from was left bare. Reported by the owner the button was built for, the day after he used it, with a 41 foot strip of his yard sitting on empty background. Yardstick now asks for the photo of the ground your map actually sits on, so the picture keeps covering your whole yard however far you move it. Same size, same detail, and nothing extra to set. If you have already aligned yours, it corrects itself the next time the page loads.

Plan lists are in alphabetical order

The robot hands its plans back in the order they were created, which is fine for two and unhelpful for seventeen. Every list of plans in Yardstick is now sorted by name, including the picker you build a program from. Numbers sort as numbers, so "Zones 9-12" comes before "Zones 10-12", and capitals and stray spaces no longer move a name up or down the list. The order of the plans inside a program is untouched: that is your running order and it is the whole point of building one.

"What happened?" on every fault

The Faults list now has a button on each row. It reads the recording either side of that moment and tells you which readings were not normal, strongest first: anything the robot actually reported as a fault, then readings that left their normal range, then readings that changed sharply compared with the same robot a couple of minutes earlier. It says what was unusual and when. It does not guess at why. The code and the time are what Yarbo support needs.

Alerts were not saved anywhere

They lived only in memory, so they vanished when the condition cleared and again when Yardstick restarted. If you came back later to check what an alert had said, it was gone. Alerts are now kept in the recording alongside the readings that caused them, with when they were raised, acknowledged and cleared, so you can go back to one weeks later and ask what happened.

Weather radar on the wall display

A new view in the wall's rotation showing the rain and snow on its way to you, drawn over a real map of towns, roads and lakes, with your property at the middle and distance rings so you can tell how far off it is. Yardstick picks your country's own weather service from where your robot says it is: NOAA in the United States, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and the Deutscher Wetterdienst in Germany. Anywhere else in the world it uses RainViewer, which stitches the world's radars together, so the view works wherever you are. Your own country's service is preferred where there is one, because it is the better picture. Off until you turn it on, in Settings under Wall display, where you can also choose how far out to look. All of them are free and need no account, and the map underneath is OpenStreetMap. Yardstick keeps one copy of each on your computer and refreshes the weather every couple of minutes however many screens are showing it, and the view says how old the picture is, because radar that has quietly stopped updating looks exactly like clear skies. This is the only thing on the wall that reaches outside your house, which is why it is off by default; your location is not sent anywhere, the request asks for a rectangle of the map.

The map editor draws the split before you make it

Splitting a zone used to be two clicks in the dark. You clicked, got a dot, clicked again, and the zone was already in two pieces. If your line missed you were told afterwards. The cut line now follows your pointer, drawn all the way to the zone's borders so you see the actual cut rather than the bit between your two clicks, and the two zones you are about to get are shaded blue and gold as you move. The loose end locks onto a corner or a border when you get close, and holding Shift keeps the cut square. If the line would not make two clean halves it says so while you can still move it, instead of after. That includes a line that crosses a U-shaped or L-shaped zone more than twice, which used to go ahead and leave you with one zone pinched to nothing in the middle.

Ending a job in the Yarbo app could get the robot sent straight back out

When the robot goes home part way through a job to charge, Yardstick holds the job and sends it out again once the pack is up. If you ended that job anywhere other than Yardstick's own buttons, Yardstick never found out. It kept waiting, and when the battery came back up it read an idle robot on a full charge as its cue and sent it out to finish a job you had just canceled. Nobody who ends a job expects it to start again. The robot keeps its own record of a suspended job and Yardstick was not asking it, so it now does: a job ended on the robot, from the app or anywhere else, drops the parked job and tells you why. A job you genuinely left charging is unaffected. The robot goes quiet for minutes at a time while it sits on the dock, so no answer is treated as no answer rather than as a cancellation.

The mowing direction stepped whenever the robot went near the master zone, whether or not it mowed it

Aligned striping uses one zone as the clock: when that zone is mowed, the whole property moves on to the next angle. The trigger was the robot leaving the zone, which is not the same thing. The robot crosses a zone on its way somewhere, starts a plan and gives up, or has a day where the blades will not spin, and every one of those moved the angle on. Measured across a month of real recording on one property: of 23 visits to the master zone, only 9 were mows. One evening had seven visits in eighty minutes that cut under 9 m² of a 346 m² zone, and the lawn's direction would have rotated 70 degrees for it. Yardstick now asks whether the zone was actually mowed, comparing the grass the robot reports cutting against the size your map gives the zone. A mow does not have to finish completely, because one that stops at 95% on an obstacle is still a mow, and a mow broken in half by the robot going off to charge still counts once.

One mow of the master zone could step the mowing direction twice, leaving the zone mowed next 10 degrees out from the rest of the lawn

Yardstick watches the master zone two ways, because no single signal covers every shape a mow takes: the robot's progress reaching the far end, and the robot moving off the zone. Both watch the same mow and see it at different moments, and only sightings within a minute of each other were treated as one event. That was the wrong test, and when two sightings of one mow fell further apart than that the direction stepped twice, leaving the lawn set 10 degrees away from what the master had actually just cut. Yardstick now counts one step per visit to the master zone, however many ways it notices that visit, and carries that across restarts. Replaying nine days of real recording, this removes two double steps, including one nobody had spotted, and keeps every genuine mow at the same moment as before.

The mowing-direction self-check reported healthy zones as badly wrong

After a zone is mowed, Yardstick re-measures which way its stripes actually ran and compares that against what it had learned before. The comparison was going the long way round, so two zones agreeing to within eight degrees were logged as more than 170 degrees apart. Nothing was ever mowed wrong by it, because that check only reports, but a warning that fires on healthy zones is a warning nobody can use.

Rain rules only ever read a Tempest

The rule that switches a no-go zone on after rain asked for readings from a Tempest station specifically, so with any other source it found nothing, and a zone with no weather data waits rather than guessing. It reads whichever source you have turned on. Readings from a station you have switched away from are no longer used, so a Tempest that failed last week cannot answer for the source that replaced it.

Weather without a weather station

Until now weather meant owning a WeatherFlow Tempest. Settings now offers a Source with two public services alongside it, and neither needs an account, a key, or anything to sign up for.

National Weather Service

covers the United States, taking conditions from the nearest reporting station and rainfall from NOAA's radar, which measures a patch about two thirds of a mile across over your property. MET Norway works anywhere in the world; it is a forecast rather than a measurement, so it says what rain is expected rather than what fell.

Your own Tempest is still the best source, because it is the only one that measures your actual lawn, and nothing changes for anyone using one. One source is used at a time, and switching is meant to be routine: if a Tempest fails, run a public source until the replacement arrives and then switch back. Your station ID is kept, so switching back is one click.

Send diagnostics now includes what the aerial photo is doing

The report carries which source you chose, which one you are actually looking at, when that imagery was flown, how old the cached photo is and whether you have nudged it. If Google was chosen and the key is not working, the report says so in one line, so a support reply does not have to start with a round of questions. Coordinates, the request address and your Google key are left out, the same as everything else in that report.

The map editor stayed locked for five minutes after a job ended

End a job in the Yarbo app, open the editor, and it still said Yarbo had a job in progress, quoting how many minutes were left and how far along it was. Those numbers were real but frozen: the robot stops reporting them when a job ends rather than reporting zero, and Yardstick believed them for five minutes. Meanwhile the robot had been saying it was idle the whole time. It now takes the robot's word for it. A paused job still keeps the editor locked, because a paused job can be resumed.

A resumed job did not always lock the map editor

A plan that had been paused and restarted reports a different status, and only one of the two was being treated as a job in progress.

The aerial photo now says what it is and when it was taken

A small line under the map gives the source and, for the free US imagery, the year it was flown and how much ground each pixel covers. A tester spent a support thread certain his Google key was working while he was looking at four-year-old imagery, because nothing on screen said otherwise. If your Google key stops working the map already falls back to the free source; now the line tells you that is what you are looking at.

A switch in Settings to show the photo's workings

Under Map imagery, off unless you turn it on. It puts a panel under the map with the patch of ground the image covers, how many meters a pixel is, the cached file and its age, and any nudge you have applied, ready to paste into a support ticket. Your Google key is never shown in it.

Sync map now refreshes the satellite photo as well as the yard

It fetched the robot's zones and left the picture underneath them alone, so somebody looking at imagery that did not match their yard pressed the one button that sounds like it should help, watched the map redraw, and got the same photo back. Syncing now drops the cached photo for that yard and fetches it again. A photo only refreshed itself when the shape of your yard changed or after it had sat for ninety days; this is how you ask for a new one now.