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