I do not know how it was in the southern hemisphere but here in the northern hemisphere April was a month of changes. Although at the end of April we had some unexpected snow in Lithuania, the final battle with winter is over and now we are moving towards green and hot summertime on the wings of late spring.
Along with the weather change, the flespi team is slowly changing its headquarters from Belarus to Lithuania due to a deep political and economical crisis in our motherland. The decision to change lives and move from a home country to another is always a hard one, but we do not have much choice. In order to work and live safely, we had to make this decision. Finally, we settled in a new Gurtam office in Vilnius — not the whole team yet, but a critical part of it. Now, whatever happens in Belarus, it will not interrupt our operability.
We did one more month in a row with 100% uptime in both regions. For the outside observer, the picture may look very calm. Although our automatic problems detection system didn’t notice any issues, inside we upgraded and rebooted all our servers with the latest kernel, replaced a couple of broken SSDs drives, and survived an unexpected power outage on our primary PostgreSQL mirror during the replacement of one of the rack switches. Add to this hundreds of updates to various platform components we perform almost daily.
- We have a few ongoing changes in the REST API that I would like to bring to your attention. First of all, we marked the older device telemetry retrieval API call as deprecated. We also slightly changed the format of the filter parameter in some API calls, the most important of which is device message retrieval. Both changes were already announced in the flespi NOC for all users and we also sent personal notifications to all affected users in order to guarantee a smooth transition. If you have any kind of questions about the upcoming changes, please contact us in HelpBox.
- We installed a new module that provides authorization capabilities for flespi users. Basically, it provides third-party applications with a secure way to authorize users with flespi (retrieve flespi token) in a mobile or web application without the need to create any kind of backend. This system supports authorization via login/password, popular services and social networks like Google, Facebook, Github as well as corporate oAuth systems. Be aware that this module is currently running in experimental mode and its REST API is subject to change at any moment without a preliminary notification. If you are interested in such functionality please let us know via HelpBox. You are welcome to try and test it.
- Flespi is now compatible with the Key Telematics platform via a special stream.
- We added message validators for streams and plugins that allow filtering messages based on the criteria specified in the expression.
- We introduced a lot of small but important modifications to the analytics system, which is now getting more and more capabilities each month.
- The most significant change that we have on the horizon is a transition from a one-second resolution of device messages to microseconds (one second contains 1,000,000 microseconds). This is an extremely useful feature for modern devices capable of generating multiple messages per second. The update should be smooth and we will notify everyone in advance about the exact day and time it will occur.
- We also plan to add command queues to devices soon — something that combines the best qualities of device settings and channel commands.
- As usual, we will keep enhancing protocols with new functions, commands, and supported models, implementing new capabilities for analytics, and introducing minor changes to our frontend application — something that we do on a daily basis.
Please enjoy the last and warmest month of spring and the flespi team will take care of the rest!
