Status of latest development

Bob's Blog
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I’ve been through quite a few ALPHA releases over the past few months, but have been unable to produce a new general release. I thought I’d take a few minutes and explain what is happening.

Releases 02_02_30, which is the current MAJOR release, incorporated asynchronous HTTP and was a major improvement. It took awhile to settle that in, but it is currently a workhorse for most users. There are a few issues, but generally it works well.

The 02_03_nn series that has been going through ALPHA is another big jump in functionality. The major improvements are:

  • Ability to communicate over VPN and through proxies.
  • Administrator and User authorization using digest authorization.
  • Increased heap availability
  • Ability to extract additional data such as Hz, Amps, VA, kWh, PF in addition to Volts and Watts
  • Allow larger configuration files
  • Improvements to influxDB
    Also, there are a lot of minor bug fixes.

But there have been growing pains. The major advances with TCP are enabled by the release of a new ESP8266 core by the Espresif team. That core incorporates an updated IP layer called LwIP2. 02_02_30 uses LwIP1. There have been a lot of issues with this. Some I have been able to mitigate by doing things differently, others I have had to wait for the Espressif team to address. Some are still outstanding…

This is what progress looks like. The Espressif folks are committed to LwIP2 and have said they do not intend to support LwIP1 any longer. IoTaWatt needs the LwIP2 functionality anyway. Lately, I’ve been using the development core, as opposed to the latest released core, in an attempt to get relief from some of what I perceive to be underlying problems. It’s kind of like Whack-a-Mole. I get a needed fix but also a new problem in the bargain.

The was a new formal release about a week ago, and I intend to try to produce a stable new release using that and hopefully bring it to general release. Thanks to the ALPHA users who have been discovering and reporting the various problems that have emerged throughout this process. The effort is much better for it.

5 Likes
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Just here to say thanks for a great product and an excellent support.

Thanks a lot!!!

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I am probably jumping to conclusions here, does the new core mean that there will be a new hardware revision released in the near future?

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Thanks for asking. I guess I never really explained what I mean by that. It’s a term that is used by some to describe all of the underlying firmware that is packaged by the Arduino/ESP8266 project. It is also called the “platform” in Platformio, which is the IDE (integrated development environment) that I use.

The platform is something like an operating system and includes bug fixes as well as improvements and new features that are packaged as a release by the ESP developers.

There have been no actual hardware changes to the ESP12S that IoTaWatt uses as far as I’m aware, nor are there any changes planned for the IoTaWatt.

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Ok, that makes a lot more sense. So you were not referring to a CPU core but a firmware package. Thanks for straightening it up :slight_smile: