Make temp sensor scanning more user friendly

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Currently you have to scan temperature sensors one a time. This works okay when 
you are first building a system but for someone who has fully integrated things 
and has perhaps hard wired sensors it can be very troublesome. The 1-Wire 
protocol has support for bus scanning with multiple devices attached and I 
suggest we figure out what the bugs are in our implementation and make it 
possible to scan multiple devices and select from the list of found devices.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by jvonnieda@gmail.com on 30 Aug 2010 at 2:21

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I don't know. I think the current design is pretty user friendly. If multiple 
sensors are detected during a scan, how will the end user know which one is 
which? They certainly aren't going to know by the unique ID. Maybe if users had 
three different temps of liquid in contact with three sensors - they could 
multi-scan and choose by temp, but I think that is more trouble than it's 
worth. The setup should only really need to be done once, unless you keep 
changing them out or adding new ones. Thoughts?

Original comment by keith.mycek on 30 Aug 2010 at 2:44

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In a perfect world you only set them up once, but I've been helping a user with 
some hardware problems over the past few days and they have had to re-init 
their EEPROM. That clears the sensors and in their case they had to go in and 
disconnect everything to start over. If you don't have quick disconnect 
connectors on your temperature sensors this can be a real hassle. 

In my case, the first thing I did after scanning all my temperature sensors was 
label them with the unique ID that I don't have to guess in the future. 

Mainly, I see this as an unnecessary limitation and think it would be valuable 
to remove the limitation.

Original comment by jvonnieda@gmail.com on 30 Aug 2010 at 3:47

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My point is that most users won't know what unique ID corresponds to what temp 
probe, and the only way they are going to know that is to hook up one at a time.

I agree that once that is done, you can write down that information for future 
use. Then you can "scan all" and manually assign the right name to the right 
UID. I guess my point is that I would like to see this implemented as an 
additional menu item, not a replacement for the current solution. That way we 
can accomodates both usage scenarios. 

Original comment by keith.mycek on 2 Sep 2010 at 6:22

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I have just read this one! I have looked at the code recently to see our 
options here. I have not go depth in the subject but I think there is some 
options. 

I have experimented the same scenarios as jvonnieda. I do label my probes as 
well. Since, I have lot of instability with my probe I changed them from 
location/role to another or move them out of the system. I think the 
assignation paradigm could be reversed! At the present, a sensor name (HLT, 
MLT, BK...) has to be selected in order to be assigned. But, there could be no 
sensor available(forget to hook it up, bad sensor, bad connection...)! 

I would see the assignation menu that brings all available and not assigned 
sensors, for which no assignation has been made (but ideally, I would prefer 
the menu to show all available sensor assigned or not and allow to override an 
existing sensor assignation with the new selection and make the previously 
assigned sensor immediately available for new assignation).

This way, if someone is making is first assignation he can connect one sensor 
at the time or connect them all and assign randomly. But now, for the advanced 
users who know what they want, the menu navigation would be much more 
convenient to assign and change their sensors. 

That is just a first draft idea! 

Original comment by shimodabt@gmail.com on 14 Sep 2010 at 2:25

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Original comment by mattreba@gmail.com on 26 Jan 2011 at 8:21

• Changed state: New