Rain Bird Irrigation Controller

The Good--- First thing. I LOVE Rainbird sprinkler products and recommend them. I use them for several properties. Rainbird plastics engineering knows their stuff. The ESP controllers are well built, modular expansion, and excellent build quality. Five stars all the way. The Bad--- ZERO stars... for the WiFi module and software on IOS. Without hesitation the the worst software to control a simple task ever created. Sadly Rainbird hired the wrong programmer and s now stuck with an epic software lemon and has been rolled out worldwide. I finally gave in and threw the whole system in the trash and bought the competitor with R in their name. I highly doubt Rainbird management has walked through setting up and using the competition. It is night a day. Rainbird knows plastic and is saddled with HORRID software that barely functions. The R competition is a software first company , and it's a dream to use. Trust me, avoid this WiFi module at all costs. ------ older reviews, after still waiting for Rainbird to update software, a near total fail ---- SUFFERED through 2018 year with this horrible software, hoping they would see comments and fix things. Nope. I'll just stop with one example. The first screen has pencil, raindrop, envelope, and trash can. THATs It. Press the can and you deleted your programs. Press envelope to invite friends. Now that is important. The pencil takes you into edit mode (which you find later is also control mode), and the raindrop is manual station control (the only thing that kinda works as it should). Touch the controller picture and it does same as edit, and more pencils, camera, and trashcan. Plus now lists programs. Press run works. But the only other option is Skip Next. Skip Next WHAT? Day, station, month, meal? And try to shut a sprinkler event off (like neighbor walking up to house) and good luck. IMHO This software is a dog. Written by a novice programmer to show off their skill. This ialone is reason NOT to but this controller. I am buying a different brand. I'm tired of Rainbird being so bad. --Tah tah. Oh, forgot to mention this software contacts railbird every ten seconds. I have more contacts in my logs to railbird than ALL of my Netflix sessions. Why does my sprinkler need to contact railbird every ten seconds, and bog down my network. I could go on..... STUFF is bad folks. After several months of use, the Rainbird WiFi solution with ESPme is the BIGGEST disappointment of any product in the last 10 years. The software component (IOS) is easily the worst user interface of any product I have ever used. Pros: WiFi does work and the idea of adding this to an ESPme controller and use the same modules is great. Yes you can connect and the IOS software will talk to the controller. So YES, it does work and gives you control over the front panel. BUT... Cons: Good luck in doing anything except setting programs and letting it run. The user interface is nearly impossible to understand. You cannot see What Happened (no logs or listing of what events occurred). And the software is written from an engineer perspective, not a user perspective. This software is such a mess you must spend hours of sifting around, wondering if it is working. Absolutely terrible. Con2: The software talks across your network 10X the amount of Netflix. It slows your WiFi to a crawl with queries back to corporate every few seconds. The engineers don't have a clue what they are doing here. PLEASE.... If you do any thing to improve your life today, your best decision is DO NOT buy this product thinking you will enjoy simple control over your sprinklers. If you want pain and anguish, and good luck stopping a sprinkler in an emergency (someone walking by) or feeling a little in control. Rain Bird should be ashamed of this. They make great plastic products but the product manager and engineer for this solution blew it. And bad. Love Rainbird other products, including the controller itself. Only the software component is the problem. I hope they fix it. Moving on.