HAPI Re-Engineered

The last post on this site regard­ing the HAPI tech­nol­o­gy stack, announc­ing the 2.0 firmware alpha release, was near­ly a year and a half ago. It hint­ed at good things to come. Short­ly there­after, the HAPI project start­ed los­ing steam. I won’t go into details but suf­fice it to say that tech­ni­cal devel­op­ment had slowed to a tur­tle pace with­in 4 weeks after that post. And while oth­er aspects of the project did make occa­sion­al progress, advances in the core tech­ni­cal aspects were non-exis­tent.

We are excit­ed to announce that the project has recov­ered from this peri­od of hiber­na­tion. It’s back on-track and quick­ly pick­ing up steam. Over the past 3 weeks, the firmware code has been sim­pli­fied and tight­ened. More­over, the Mas­ter Con­troller code, which was basi­cal­ly a hodge­podge of one-off func­tions, has been com­plete­ly rewrit­ten. It is now a much more coher­ent rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a grow facil­i­ty. The addi­tion of a rela­tion­al data­base has dra­mat­i­cal­ly boost­ed the capa­bil­i­ties of the sys­tem. (see how HAPI works)

With stream­lined firmware code, a re-engi­neered mas­ter con­troller and a new rela­tion­al data­base under­ly­ing the plat­form, we weren’t sure how to label the new ver­sion. It could have been the 2.0 Beta release, or maybe 2.1. But both of those seemed to imply a pro­gres­sion from what was out there before, rather than the rad­i­cal step for­ward that it is. More­over, since no one out­side of the project is run­ning a HAPI sys­tem, it seems like­ly that no one real­ly cares what we call it any­way. There­fore, the shiny, new sys­tem will soon be released as HAPI Sys­tem v1.0.

The new release will have some great new fea­tures, with a focus on sim­pli­fy­ing the instal­la­tion, con­fig­u­ra­tion and oper­a­tion of the sys­tem. Some of the sex­i­er fea­tures include a graph­i­cal user dash­board, com­plete data log­ging and inte­gra­tion with Weath­er Under­ground.

We’ve also built out the infra­struc­ture for the project by incor­po­rat­ing a project man­age­ment sys­tem (Kan­board) and mov­ing the code base, tech­ni­cal wiki and issue track­ing over to GitHub.

We’re post­ing a Devel­op­er Call-To-Action on numer­ous web­sites fre­quent­ed by devel­op­ers that have inter­est in projects like this. The extra hands and minds we attract will help us to get to our mid-July 2016 release goal for HAPI Sys­tem v1.0