Nomad 1.2 Release

Applies to: Nomad Release Track: Stable Version: 1.2 Requires action: No

Summary

Lights you can group and drive as one, with new cards, a colour wheel and an order you choose. Scenes now remember how a light looked, not just whether it was on. Every popup, button and save in the app works the same way. A message in the Log tells you what raised it and takes you there. And a Cerbo GX picks up whatever you plug into it without being removed and added again.

Light groups

A light group is a set of lights you drive as one: the lights over the table, or everything in the living area. It behaves exactly like a single light, with one power button, one brightness slider and one colour, and anything that takes a light takes a group, so a group can go in a scene, in a routine, or on your Home screen.

Tap the + on any light's card to make one, and the gear on a group's own card to add lights, remove them, or delete the group. Deleting a group leaves every light exactly as it was.

A group offers only what its lights have in common, so a colour light grouped with a plain white one gives you brightness alone. While a group is on, its lights' own cards are greyed out, because a group is for setting one look across several lights, and a light that needs its own settings belongs in a scene instead.

New light cards

The cards on the Lighting tab were too tall, and the round dial took most of that height. It is now a thick brightness slider across the middle, so twice as many cards fit on a screen.

Colour has changed too. There were eight fixed dots and nothing else, so anything outside those eight was out of reach. Now there are six on one line with a palette button at the end: tap a dot to go straight to it, or tap the palette for a colour wheel, with hue around the rim and the colours growing paler towards the middle.

Press and hold any card until it lifts and drag it where you want it. Groups sit at the top of the tab, your lights underneath, and a light you add later joins the end rather than vanishing into an order made before it existed. The card now follows your finger, with a dashed outline showing where it will land, rather than shuffling about under a cursor that never moved.

Scenes remember how a light looked

Set a light the way you want it, capture the scene, and its brightness and colour come back with it. Before this a scene stored only on or off, so a scene set for a film brought the lights back at whatever they happened to be last time. A light the scene switches off stores nothing else, so it stays off rather than coming back at last night's level.

A light group is one line in a scene and sets everything in it, so a room's worth of lights takes one entry rather than six.

The Scenes tab itself is now a grid of cards rather than a row of tabs. With nine or more scenes the row used to wrap, and it stopped being clear which one you were editing.

Everything saves the same way

Buttons, popups and saving had drifted into a dozen different shapes across the app: the same action called Done in one place and Apply in another, Cancel on the left here and on the right there, some pages saving as you went and others waiting for a button.

One way now, everywhere. A popup has its buttons along the bottom on the right, Cancel then the action, always in view. Settings rows save themselves as you change them, with a tick to confirm, so there are no Save buttons left to forget. And anything that deletes arms in place, in red, and asks Delete for good? before it goes.

A Log message tells you what raised it

"Leisure battery is getting low" told you something, then left you to work out what had decided that and at what level. A message now carries the reading and the level that tripped it, and names the instinct, routine or scene behind it as a link. Tap it and you land on that item, ready to adjust.

Routines used to write nothing to the Log at all, so a routine you built yourself ran invisibly. Every one now says when it fired.

Turning an instinct off also clears any alarm it was sounding, rather than leaving that alarm going with nothing left watching it.

Plugging something into a Cerbo GX

If you added or removed something on a Victron Cerbo GX, the only way to see it in Sensa was to remove the Cerbo and add it back. That took your scene settings, your Home screen choices and any routine naming a Victron reading with it, and nothing brought them back.

The Scan button on the Devices tab now does it properly. Press it and it looks over your Cerbo again in place: anything new appears, anything you unplugged goes, and everything you had set up is left alone. If the Cerbo cannot be reached at that moment nothing is changed, so a Cerbo that is merely switched off does not lose all its devices.

A Cerbo GX can also now be updated from Sensa. Its own software appears under Settings, Devices, with the version it is on and the version available, and you start the update from there. Everything wired into the Cerbo, the inverter and the solar chargers, is still updated from Victron's own apps, because Victron provides no way to start those from the van.

Restarting no longer looks like a crash

Pressing Restart Sensa used to leave you on a dead page, or drop you on a Home Assistant screen, while the system came back. A full-screen message now takes over the tablet and stays until the system is ready, then puts you back where you were rather than on the home screen. A restart takes about a minute. If the message is still there after five minutes, a Try the dashboard button appears so you can go and look.

Factory Reset works the same way, and loads the Habitation screen on its own when the unit is ready for setting up again.

Backups you laid the van up with

Backups on the van were kept for three days. A van left standing for a fortnight had nothing inside that window, and only the single newest copy was held back, which is thin cover at the moment you are least likely to be watching.

The three newest are now always kept, whatever their age, on each destination separately. A van in use every night is unaffected, because three days is three backups anyway.

The tidy-up also catches up when your system starts. A unit switched off at three in the morning used to wait until the following night, so on a van used at weekends the backups piled up on the card.

The levelling view

The top-down levelling view was four coloured wedges, which told you the van was down at one corner without telling you how far. It is now the spirit level it should always have been: a target ring with a bubble in it, and inside the ring means level. Only a corner outside tolerance carries any colour, so your eye goes to the wheel that needs the ramp.

Pixel strips, and controllers fed from a relay

The Effect dropdown on an addressable strip now has None at the top, which is how you stop an animation and go back to a plain colour. Picking a colour yourself stops one too, and the dropdown then reads None. It tells you what the strip is doing now rather than which animation last ran.

Two settings have appeared on every lighting controller, under Settings, Devices. Power-On Delay is how long a controller fed from a relay channel is given to wake up before the light is told to come on; it ships at half a second. If you tap a light on, the button lights and the strip stays dark until you tap again, raise it a little at a time. Leave Relay On keeps the supply live when you switch the light off, so the controller stays awake and the next tap is instant. Leave it off for a van parked up, where cutting the supply is the point.

Smaller things

• The Devices list marks some entries Unverified. It means we have not yet run that exact model on our own bench, most often because one entry covers a range and only one of them has been through the workshop. It is not a warning, and nothing is held back.
• An Experimental devices switch on the System tab lets Sensa find devices we are still testing. Leave it off unless we ask you to turn it on.
• Fogstar Drift Gen1 leisure batteries are now found and read.
• The three overheating levels for the unit itself are always shown in °C, even on a system set to °F, because they describe the hardware rather than the weather.