September 2026

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.

The coverage squares can be switched off

A new Coverage button under the map hides the colored grid, leaving the planned route, the driven path and the missed grass visible underneath it. The squares are the point of the map so they stay on by default, but they are drawn on top of exactly what you are studying when you want to know where the robot did not go, and there was no way to move them aside. Asked for by two owners independently. The color scale hides itself along with them, since it describes nothing once they are gone, and the map does not move when you toggle it.

The satellite photo only covered the ground you had already mowed

It was framed from the positions the robot had recorded, so on a new install it came back sized to wherever the robot had been so far and sat as a small square inside your full yard map, with zones, no-go areas and the dock hanging outside it. It looks like imagery dropped in the wrong place, and it is one of the first things a new owner sees. On a yard that has been mowed end to end the two extents are the same, which is why this went unnoticed: on the recording box the driven area is 95 x 260 m against a mapped 96 x 254 m. The photo is now framed to cover the whole yard your robot was given, driven or not, so it is right the first time you open the map rather than after a season of mowing.

You can line the satellite photo up with your yard by hand

Under the map there is now an Align photo button: drag the photo until it sits on your yard, nudge it with the arrow keys, and Save. It is remembered per robot and applies to the map and the map editor together. Everything else on the map comes from the robot and already agrees with itself, so only the photo moves. This is for the case where the imagery and the ground genuinely disagree, which happens for two reasons nothing here can tell apart: public imagery is only accurate to about twenty feet, and a robot's reported position can carry a small fixed shift of its own. Both look the same, and both are fixed by the same drag. Untouched installs are unaffected.

An aerial photo could keep showing long after it was out of date

Once fetched, the USGS or Google satellite image behind the map was cached forever with no expiry, so whichever one had a problem last -- a bad key, a quota limit, a dropped connection -- would keep silently handing back whatever old copy sat on disk instead, no matter how long ago that was. A month-old photo turning up while switching between the two is what gave this away. Cached photos now refresh themselves after 90 days; a refresh that fails still falls back to the old copy rather than going dark.

The mowing-direction step could silently never advance when the master zone shared a plan with other zones

The step was tied to the master's own reported completion, read from its progress ratio -- but that ratio is not tracked per area. It is the running total for the whole plan the robot is executing, shared across every zone in it. On a plan that runs the master alongside other zones, the master's own share of that total can top out well short of "done," so the step never fired: the master's zones would still visibly finish and the direction would still turn on schedule when it ran alone, but a zone mowed right after it in the same plan kept the old angle. It now also advances the moment the robot moves off the master to a different zone, which holds regardless of how the plan is put together.

The schedule-fault and asleep warnings can now be dismissed

Both used to sit under the date filter with no way to close them -- the asleep one always, the schedule-fault one on purpose, since it used to be reasoned that dismissing it would hide something still true. Both are dismissible now, the same way the update notices already are: a longer sleep, a new fault, or a different date filter all change the message, which brings the warning back even if an earlier version of it was dismissed.

Recorded area and job area now also show in acres

The home page showed square footage only. Below that figure, in the same box, it now also shows the acreage, since that is how a yard's size actually gets talked about. Shown regardless of whether the page is set to feet or meters.

Compacting the database could leave it looking bigger, not smaller

The checkpoint that reclaims space after a compact can only succeed if nothing else has so much as a read open on the file at that exact instant. On a running install that is never guaranteed on the first try, and when it missed, the entire rewritten database was left sitting in the write-ahead log instead of the main file -- nothing was lost, but the reported size looked roughly doubled and stayed that way until something else happened to catch a clear moment, which could be a very long wait. It now retries for a few seconds until it actually succeeds, and says so in the log on the rare occasion it still cannot.

Brief, confirmed-cleared faults are dropped from the trouble list

A "Charging fault" that comes and goes on its own inside a second or two was showing up in the fault history table dozens of times a month, on a property where it is entirely harmless. Anything that clears on its own inside 30 seconds is no longer listed by default; Settings → Advanced has "Shortest fault worth reporting" if you would rather change that, including down to 0 to see everything. Nothing currently unresolved is ever hidden this way, however briefly it has been seen so far -- only a fault we know for certain cleared, and cleared quickly, counts as noise.

Missed grass looked exactly as thick as before it was ever thinned

The line width was halved a few days ago, but the fix never accounted for the map's own zoom -- the red and its white casing scaled up right along with it, so the closer you looked at a miss to judge its width, the wider it drew. Zoomed in far enough, that swallowed the whole improvement. It now holds a fixed width on screen at any zoom, the same way the map's pins already do.

Minor bug fix

Updates made to Mac system update module.

Yardstick no longer switches your schedules off over something it cannot see

If a program used an area Yardstick did not recognize, it turned that program off and left it off. It should never have done that. Yardstick starts a plan and the robot decides which areas that plan covers, so an area Yardstick cannot see is one the robot handles perfectly well anyway. It now tells you what it cannot check and leaves your schedule running. Anything an earlier version switched off this way is switched back on for you.

An explanation when the trimmer is the reason

If you use the trimmer, Yardstick cannot see trimming areas, because it does not support the trimmer yet. Every plan that includes trimming therefore looked like a plan pointing at deleted areas. The warning now says so plainly, and says the plan will still run and there is nothing to fix.

Your programs could be switched off because of an out-of-date copy of your map

Yardstick keeps its own copy of your yard, and it was only ever fetched once, when Yardstick first ran, or when you edited the map from inside Yardstick. Change anything in the Yarbo app and Yardstick never found out. It then compared your programs against that old copy, decided the areas it did not recognize had been deleted, and switched the programs off. One tester lost a week of mowing this way, and restarting did not help, because restarting was never what refreshed it. Two changes: the map is now genuinely refreshed rather than fetched once and kept forever, and the check that switches programs off now refuses to act at all on a copy more than a few hours old. It would rather say nothing than cancel your mowing on a guess. There is also a Sync map button on the main page if you ever want to force it.

A failed update on a Mac now says what to do about it

If macOS refused to open the installer, Yardstick repeated Apple's own words back at you: "RBSRequestErrorDomain Code=5, Launch failed, OSLaunchdErrorDomain Code=112, Could not find specified domain". That names an internal macOS detail and tells you nothing. It now explains what happened, that the update was downloaded and checked so nothing is lost, and gives you two ways to finish it, including where the file already is on your Mac.

A computer that went to sleep quietly spoiled the coverage map

While the machine was asleep nothing was recorded, and the gap that left in the readings was read as the robot leaving a patch of grass and coming back to it later. One night's sleep could turn a single pass over a spot into two, and three passes is what makes Yardstick stop calling a reading provisional. A yard could report itself surveyed on ground the robot had crossed once. Time the computer was not running is now discounted before any of that is worked out.

Waking the computer could set off a false "nothing heard from the robot" alert

The newest reading was hours old because the machine had been asleep, not because anything was wrong, so the first check after waking reported a missing robot to somebody who had just opened their laptop. Silence is now measured from the moment the computer woke rather than from the last reading, and every alert's waiting period is credited only with time Yardstick was actually running.

An update check that failed said you were up to date

If the list of releases could not be read -- no internet, or a hiccup at our end -- the check came back with the same green "No updates available. You are on the current version" as a check that had really run and found nothing. There was no way to tell the two apart, so a computer could sit for months believing it was current while new versions came out without it. A check that could not complete now says so, and says plainly that it is not a report that you are up to date.

Tapping "Full version" on a phone was permanent

The choice was remembered for a year, no page offered a way back, and clearing the browser's stored site data was the only cure. The full page now carries a link back to the mobile version when you are on a phone, and taking it forgets the choice.

Yardstick keeps this computer awake while it is recording

A computer that falls asleep records nothing, and that time cannot be recovered: no map, no alerts, and no way to send the robot home at curfew. Yardstick now asks the machine not to sleep on its own while a recording is running. It cannot stop everything -- closing a laptop lid still sleeps, and so does choosing Sleep from the menu -- and it lets go whenever the computer is on battery, so it will not flatten a laptop. There is a switch for it under Settings, in "What gets recorded", and it starts on.

When the computer was asleep, the map now says so

A hole in the recording used to look exactly like a robot with nothing to report. The map page now says how long this computer was asleep during whatever period you are looking at, so a gap in the coverage has an explanation instead of being a mystery.

On a Mac, Yardstick now starts with the computer instead of with you

It used to run inside your login session, which meant it did not exist until somebody signed in, it stopped when you logged out, and a Mac that came back from a power cut sat there recording nothing until a person walked over to it. It is a system service now, the way the Linux version has always been: it starts at boot, before anyone logs in, and keeps running after you log out. The recordings come with it: they are copied out of your own Library folder into a shared one, so every account on the Mac sees the same yard rather than one per person. Copied, not moved -- your original folder is left exactly where it was and nothing is deleted, so if anything goes wrong the old recordings are still sitting there. The computer keeps its identity through the change, so its web address and its license seat do not move either. Nothing to do and nothing to re-enter.

The map forgot which layers you had turned on

Every button under the map reset on the next visit, so anyone who works with the aerial photo switched off had to switch it off again every single time they opened the page. Yard map, Aerial, Whole property, Planned route, Missed grass, Path and Trouble are all remembered now, per browser. A first visit still behaves exactly as it did, including framing the whole yard while there is barely any coverage to frame -- but once you press that button, your choice wins from then on.

A QR code for setting up phone notifications

Getting alerts to your phone through ntfy meant copying a long random topic like yardstick-413b5c52fe32c09b into an app by hand, and one wrong character subscribes you to a topic nobody sends to, silently. There is now a

Show QR code

button beside the topic in Settings, Notifications. Point your phone's camera at it and subscribe. The code is drawn on your own computer, so the topic is never handed to anybody else to turn into a picture.

The blowing and throw lines now move with their work area

A blowing line is drawn along the edge of an area, and reshaping the area used to leave the line exactly where it was, still describing a border that had moved. Drag one corner and the line follows that corner: the part of it on the edges you moved comes with you, and the rest stays put. It works the same when you drag the whole area, scale it with Shift, or grow it with the inch buttons. There is a switch in the layer list, "Link work area and blow direction", on to start with. Turn it off when you want to adjust a line against a border that is already right.

An icon when you add Yardstick to a phone's home screen

Adding it on an iPhone gave a gray thumbnail of the page. It now gives the Yardstick mark, named Yardstick.

Fixed on Windows: the secure address worked on the PC running Yardstick and timed out from every other device

The installer opened the ordinary port in Windows Firewall and never opened the secure one, so a phone got no answer while the same link worked on the PC itself, because a machine talking to itself does not pass through the firewall. Installing this version opens it.

The missed-grass overlay marked long straight passes as missed when they had been mowed

Reported by a tester as large red areas in the middle of ground that had never been missed. The driven path is simplified before it is drawn, and a long straight pass collapses to its two endpoints; the coverage check then refused to measure along any stretch longer than 15 m, so the middle of a stripe had nothing to match against. On the test property this was coloring about six percent of the route red without cause, concentrated on exactly the long open passes where it was most visible.

After stopping a job, the phone's top card still said the robot was paused and working on an area

The rest of the screen showed the job ended and it was; the card was reading fields that freeze at their last values when a job finishes and stay frozen through the next one. The card now says nothing about a job once there is no job: no area, no percentage, no time remaining.

On a phone, every alert read "[object Object]"

The Needs attention card was reaching for a field an alert does not have, so the words never arrived. It now shows the alert and its detail.

A Dismiss button on the phone's Needs attention card

It acknowledges the alert the same way the desktop does, so silencing it on your phone silences it everywhere rather than only on the handset you were holding. A condition that clears and comes back speaks up again, and a different problem arriving after a dismissal is still shown.

The Stop button is red before you press it, and glows when you do

It is the one control that has to be found without reading it, so it carries its meaning standing still rather than waiting for a hover, and the press now leaves a mark you can see. A stop that looks identical before and after is a stop you press twice.

Stop on a robot that was charging made the Yarbo app announce "Charging Failed"

A robot sitting on the charger with nothing running is already stopped, and ending its charge is not what anybody pressing Stop meant. Stop now leaves it alone and says so. A robot docked and not charging with a job still open is the case Stop is actually for, and that is unchanged.

Stop held the job instead of ending it

Stop paused the running plan first, and a paused job is still a job: the robot then went to the dock with it open and sat on the charger without charging. Stop now stops the wheels, blades and blower and ends the job outright. Pause is still its own button.

Sending the robot to the dock left the old job open, and it could sit on the charger without charging

Reported after a robot spent the night on the dock showing an active recharge job that was doing nothing. Send to dock now ends the open job first and then sends the robot home, which is the order that works: ending it afterwards would cancel the drive home.

An End job button, beside Send to dock

The same thing the Yarbo app's End job button does. A job can need ending without sending the robot anywhere, and until now nothing here could do it.

A STOP button on the phone view

Whatever the robot is doing, one press stops it where it is: the running job is held and the wheels, blades and blower all stop. One button, no confirmation step, nothing underneath it; a Stop that asks whether you are sure is a Stop that did not happen.

The Battery panel says when the robot is stranded on the dock

A robot that docks with a job still open sits on the charger without charging, and nothing anywhere said so. On the machine this was found on, it held 95% for seventeen minutes while its owner assumed it was charging. The panel now says how long it has been like that and what clears it.

The Battery panel now shows what each charge actually reached, by two independent measures

Owners watch their reported charge slide from 100% into the low eighties and cannot tell whether the pack is dying or the gauge is drifting; the usual method is to unplug the battery for four hours and compare percentages over days. The panel now plots, for every charge that physically completed, what the robot reported alongside a figure worked out from pack voltage and a standard lithium curve, which the gauge cannot move. Both falling together is capacity genuinely lost. Only the reported figure falling is the gauge drifting, and a disconnection that appears to fix it has reset the gauge rather than repaired the pack. On the recording this was built from, 38 charges completed: the voltage figure sat at 99 to 100% every time, and the robot's own reading was up to 35 points below it on nine of them.

The panel leads with the answer in a sentence, not with the chart. Two lines is a question, and working out which number to believe is the arithmetic the panel is supposed to be doing for you. It says which of three things is true -- the two agree, the gauge is under-reading a healthy pack, or the pack really is holding less -- and the readings behind it are one click away for anybody who wants them.

On an install with two cores, one robot working locked the other robot's map

The map editor refuses to edit while Yarbo has a job in progress, which is right: geometry must not change under a robot that is acting on it. But it asked whether any core was working rather than the one whose map was open, so an owner mowing the front yard could not edit the back yard's map, and the notice blamed a robot that was parked. It now reads the job state of the core being edited, and switching cores re-checks before the new map appears.

On a phone, an install with more than one core showed only one robot

The phone view took whichever core answered first and gave no sign the others existed, so half a fleet was invisible with nothing on screen to say so. There is now a picker at the top of the page. It appears only when there is more than one core to choose between, and the choice carries through the status card, the map, the plan list, the schedule and the buttons. The robot you pick on your phone is the one the full version opens on.

Parts of the app were written in British English

Most visibly the Battery panel, which used a British word for the area that costs the most to cut. It now says most expensive and least expensive, and the rest of the app has been gone through as well.

Backup names were missing from the map editor's Backups panel

The Keep button added in 0.9.126 pushed the name out of the row, so every backup showed as a row of buttons with nothing to tell them apart. The name now has a line of its own.

The Battery panel now shows which parts of the yard the charge went on

The figure above it pools every run into one number, which can say how long a charge lasts and cannot say why one lasts half as long as another. On a real recording the runs ranged from 18 to 51 percent per cutting hour. The new table splits the same runs by area, names the plans each area belongs to, and orders them most expensive first, so the expensive part of the yard is the first thing you see. Each run in the table above it now names the area it was spent in too, so a single surprising run can be traced without reading the whole yard. Areas worked too little to rate are counted rather than shown, and the hours behind every row are printed, because four hours of evidence and sixteen do not deserve equal weight.

Opening Yardstick on a phone now gives you a page built for a phone

It answers four things and stops: what the robot is doing now, where it is on the map, anything that needs attention, and what is scheduled next. It can start a saved plan, pause, and send the robot back to the dock. Settings, the scheduler, backups and the map editor stay on the full page, which is a link away at the bottom and is remembered once you follow it. Turn the whole thing off under Settings, Access and login, and every phone gets the full page instead.

A number of small bugs

Map backups

You can now mark a backup to keep, so it is never removed automatically to make room for another. Restoring a backup also checks it is the one you expected before it replaces your map.

Yardstick notices when a schedule depends on a part of the map you have deleted, and stops it running

Delete a work area in the Yarbo app and any program that mows it was quietly broken: it stayed switched on, came due, and did less than it said or nothing at all. The same went for a no-go zone schedule or a weather rule naming a zone you had removed.

Now the program, schedule or rule is switched off, you get the same notification you get for anything else, the home page says which one and why, and the Scheduler marks it with a red X naming exactly what is missing, by name, even though the thing has been deleted. Sections you keep folded say so in their heading. It stays off after you fix the map until you switch it back on yourself, so a schedule never quietly resumes without you knowing.

It only ever acts on a real answer. A robot it cannot reach and a map it has never fetched both look like "everything was deleted", and neither will switch anything off.

In the map editor, points could pick up somewhere other than where you clicked

Selecting a zone adds the Zone size buttons to the toolbar, and on a narrower window that pushes the toolbar onto another row and makes the map slightly shorter. The map was not re-fitting to its new shape, so from then on every click landed a little way from the pointer, by nothing in the middle of the map and up to about 13 pixels out toward the edges, which is further than the reach of a point. Zoomed in, that was enough to grab the wrong point or none at all. The map now re-fits whenever its size changes, for any reason.

Points picked themselves up from a long way off, and worse the more you zoomed in

The invisible circle that catches a click on a point was carrying an extra half meter of catch area that nobody could see. Half a meter is nothing when the whole yard is on screen and it is most of the screen when you are zoomed right in, which is why this looked like the pointer was nowhere near the point that moved, and why it was worst on memory paths where the points sit close together. A point is now picked up only when you are on it.

It was too easy to grab the wrong point

The circle that caught your click was more than twice the size of the white dot you were aiming at. It now sits just outside the dot, and where points are close together it shrinks so it can never reach into a neighbor.

Opening the map editor while signed out sent you to Settings

It now asks you to sign in to your Yarbo account right there on the editor, the same way the scheduler does, and loads your map as soon as you do.

Opening the map editor without a Yarbo account sent you to a page that could not sign you in

Clicking the map editor while signed out took you to Settings, Map editing, which explained that you needed to sign in somewhere else and gave you no way to do it. That page now says whether you are signed in and has a button that takes you straight to the sign-in with the cursor already in it.

A license that had been reinstated could still report itself as canceled

Activating it said it worked, and then the same screen said the license was canceled. Yardstick checks a copy of the cancellation list that it refreshes once a day, so a license put right on our side after that copy was taken looked canceled here until the next refresh. Activating a key now fetches the current list first, and a license that looks canceled, expired, or in use on another computer is re-checked every few minutes instead of once a day, so it comes right on its own.

The base station is called the Data Center, the same as Yarbo calls it

Yardstick said "home base" on the radio layers and "Base station" in the health panel. One box should have one name, and it should be the name on the thing.

The light on the home page turns red when Yardstick is not recording

It was gray, which reads as nothing much being wrong. Not recording is the one state where Yardstick is doing nothing at all, so it now says so in the same color Settings has always used.

A Support tab in Settings

One place for the things you need when something is wrong: open a ticket, the help and how-to pages, what changed in this version, and the website. The diagnostic report has moved here from Software and help, next to the ticket link, because sending it and opening a ticket are the same errand.

"Start Yardstick when this computer starts" appeared under almost every settings heading

It belongs in one place. It is under Recording now, directly below the setting it refers to, and the Restart button is with it.

Your secure address is kept up to date even when HTTPS is not working

The part that keeps this computer's permanent name pointed at it was tangled up with the secure page starting successfully, so a computer that had trouble there stopped publishing its address entirely, and its name went on pointing wherever it last was. That is the machine most likely to need its name right. It now reports independently. If the name is not being kept up to date, the Settings page says so and why, rather than leaving you to guess.

On a Mac, switching "start when this computer starts" back on did not start Yardstick

If Yardstick was not running at the time, turning the setting on only took effect the next time you logged in. It now starts it straight away. The setting also no longer reports itself as on when something else would still stop Yardstick starting.

Light mode showed a moon

The button that switches between light and dark says which one you are in, and the icon beside it was a moon either way. It is a sun in light mode now.

On Windows, the Restart button said it worked and nothing happened

Windows had lost track of the running program shortly after starting it, so the restart stopped nothing and started nothing while still reporting success. Any setting that only takes effect after a restart never took effect. Yardstick now shuts itself down properly and Windows starts it again.

The cut-height slider had its own copy of the height range

The slider's ends were written into the page separately from the scale that converts them, so the two could drift apart and leave the slider offering a height that was quietly clamped to something else. It now takes its ends from the scale itself.

The drive pad kept using your Yarbo's old address after it changed

When your robot's address moved, Yardstick found it again and the map and panels followed it, but manual driving went on talking to the address it started with until Yardstick was restarted. It now notices and reconnects.

Restarting now shows you what is happening

Instead of the page going quiet, you get a panel that says Yardstick is restarting, roughly how long it should take, and how long it has been waiting, until it comes back and tells you so. If it does not come back, it says that too, and what to try.

Updates are now checked to be signed by us before they are installed

Yardstick already confirmed that a downloaded update matched the checksum it was supposed to, but that checksum comes from the same file that names the download, so it proved the download arrived intact and nothing about who made it. On Windows the installer is now checked to carry a valid signature in Yardstick Technologies' name before it is allowed to run, in the same way the Mac package already was, and anything Yardstick cannot verify is refused rather than run. Updates can also only be fetched from yardstickhome.com now.

The map editor's cursors were the wrong way round

Over open map you had a crosshair, where there is nothing to aim at, and the moment you moved onto a point you could grab, it became a hand. The hand is a large shape with no obvious tip, so the least precise cursor appeared exactly where precision mattered. It is now a plain arrow over open map and a crosshair on anything you can grab, so you can see precisely which point you are on. Dragging the map around still uses the hand, because that really is a grab.

The cut height on the controller was backwards, and 4 inches could not be reached

Setting the height to its highest on the Yardstick controller made your Yarbo cut at its lowest, and the other way round. It also topped out at 3.9 inches rather than 4. Two of you reported it and it is now fixed: the controller sets the height you asked for, and the full 4 inches down to 0.8 inches is available.

What went wrong: Yardstick treated the height as a measurement in millimeters, which it is not. Your Yarbo uses a scale that runs the other way, where the lowest number is the tallest cut. The map editor already had this right; the controller did not, and the two disagreed. They now share one conversion, and a test fails if either is ever changed without the other.

The Battery panel no longer says "warming" for a minute after an update

The panel is built from your whole recording, and the result was only ever held in memory, so restarting Yardstick threw it away and it had to be rebuilt from scratch. On a large recording that took about a minute, and since taking an update restarts Yardstick, you met that gap every time you updated. The result is now kept on disk and read straight back, so the panel is there immediately. It still refreshes in the background, and a copy older than a week is rebuilt rather than shown.

Yardstick now looks for a moved robot in about a minute and a half, not ten

When Yardstick has never managed to reach your Yarbo at the address it has on file, that address is probably the problem, so it now goes looking almost straight away instead of waiting ten minutes first. The long wait is kept for the different case where your Yarbo was connected and has gone quiet, because that usually just means it is docked or asleep and will be back at the same address. If the robot really is gone, for repair or because it is a spare, the search backs off by itself instead of sweeping your network every minute.

The message while it is looking was also wrong. It said your Yarbo "may be asleep or off" at an address that was, in these cases, exactly the thing that had changed. It now says it is looking for the robot on your network and which address is not answering.

Restart Yardstick, and control whether it starts with the computer, from Settings

Some changes only take effect once Yardstick has started again, and until now the only way to do that was a command line or restarting the whole computer. Settings now has a Restart button that stops and starts Yardstick on its own, in a few seconds, with recording resuming by itself.

Beside it is a switch for whether Yardstick starts when the computer starts, along with a plain sentence saying what your particular machine does after a power cut, because that differs between Windows, Linux and a Mac and it is exactly what you want to know. This is a different thing from "Start recording automatically" above it: that one decides whether Yardstick begins recording once it is already running, this one decides whether Yardstick runs at all.

If Yardstick cannot read whether it starts automatically on your computer, it says so rather than showing the switch as off.

A robot found at a new address no longer reverts when Yardstick restarts

Yardstick is installed pointing at your Yarbo's address at that moment, and that address is written into how it starts. If your router later gave the Yarbo a different address, Yardstick would find it again, but the next restart put the original address back, so the problem returned every time and looked like the search had never worked. Yardstick now recognizes your Yarbo by its serial number and keeps the address it actually found.

You can type your Yarbo's address in yourself

Yardstick finds your robot on its own and keeps up when the address changes, but if that ever fails you are no longer stuck with only "remove this core" as a way out. Each robot on the Settings page now has a change link beside its address. Type the new one and Yardstick checks it before saving anything: it confirms a Yarbo really answers there, and that it is the same Yarbo you are editing rather than another core or the Data Center, naming both serial numbers if they differ. Once saved, recording moves to the new address straight away, with no restart and without losing the name you gave it. If you know better than the check, you can tell it to go ahead anyway.

Error codes on the home page

Every fault your Yarbo has reported since Yardstick started recording, with when it began, how long it lasted, and whether the robot ever said it had cleared. These have been recorded from the first day and never shown back: the Health panel tells you whether something is wrong now, which cannot answer what went wrong on Sunday while you were out. Sort by any column. The code is the number the machine reported and nothing here guesses at what it means; quote the code and the date to Yarbo support.

A fault the robot never reported as cleared is shown as not reported, not as cleared. The robot going quiet is not the same as the robot saying it is fine.

Sections on the home page collapse

The page had grown long enough that the thing you opened it for could sit below three panels you were not asking about. Every section starts open, and any you close stay closed the next time you visit. A closed section still shows its own summary, so you can see what is in it without opening it.

A robot that changed IP address was not always found again

When a home router hands the Yarbo a new address, Yardstick is meant to notice the silence, scan the network, find the robot by its serial and reconnect on its own. It did that when the recorder had been running and the robot went quiet. It did NOT do it in the one case that matters most: when Yardstick itself had just restarted (which is what happens when the computer running it also takes a new address) and so had never once heard from the robot at the stale address. In that state it waited on the dock for ever. It now measures how long it has been searching and goes looking after the same delay, so a recorder that comes up pointed at an old address heals itself within about ten minutes.

A computer that changed its own IP address could lose its secure web name

Yardstick gives each install a permanent, secure https://…box.yardstickhome.com name that is meant to follow the computer to whatever address its router hands it. On Windows it did not: the routine that works out the computer's own network address relied on a command that only exists on Linux, so on Windows it fell back to guessing and could pick a virtual adapter (Docker, Hyper-V, WSL) or a stale address. The permanent name then pointed at the wrong place and the secure page would not load. Yardstick now finds the address by the interface that actually reaches your Yarbo, which is correct on every system, so after this update the secure name re-points itself to the computer within a few minutes and keeps up with future address changes on its own.

The battery charge on the home page could be minutes out of date

The Battery panel is served from a saved copy so a month of history does not have to be rebuilt every time you open the page, which is right for the chart, the cell temperatures and the runtime figures. None of those change in minutes. The charge does. With a leaf blower running, a Yarbo drains over 1% a minute, so the home page could show 77% while the wall display, which reads live, showed 64%. The charge and the charging state now come from a live reading every time; everything else keeps its saved copy, so the page is no slower.

A job that stopped to charge goes back out on a partial charge

When a scheduled job goes home mid-way to charge, Yardstick used to wait for 80% before sending the robot out again, whether there were twenty minutes of mowing left or three hours. It now works out how much is left from the plan's own progress and waits only for the charge that job needs, which on a nearly finished plan can be 35% rather than 80%. That is often hours earlier.

The figures are your machine's own. Yardstick already measures how much battery an hour of cutting costs, from your recording, and re-measures continuously, so the estimate sharpens the more you mow. It never waits longer than it used to, never sends the robot out below 35% whatever the arithmetic says, and carries a margin on top of the estimate because finishing late costs nothing and running out in the yard does not. If your consumption cannot be measured yet, or the plan has never run to completion, it keeps the old fixed level rather than guessing from a number it does not have.

This applies to jobs Yardstick's own scheduler started. A plan you start from the Yarbo app is Yarbo's to manage, and Yardstick does not step into that.

There is a switch for it, on the Scheduler page under Programs: Go back out on a partial charge. It arrives on, because it can only bring a resume forward and never delay one. Turn it off and a job that stops to charge waits for the usual level again, exactly as it did before.