4 January, 2021

December 2020 change log

Major flespi improvements in December 2020.

Day after day and strange, unusual 2020 is now over. This relentless year ruined a lot of plans, businesses, and even lives. I woke up on the very first morning of 2021 with a clear understanding that this year may be even more unpredictable and cruel than the previous one. Nobody knows how soon vaccines will help our humanity to stop spreading COVID-19. And nobody knows what new challenges will pop up out of the blue. A lot of people disturbed their usual life being locked at home and migrated their social activities from normal real-life to online. And nobody knows how such circumstances will affect our mental health in the short or long term.

Looking into the results of 2020 for flespi I can notice that overall results are quite good but not as good as we expected. We doubled our income together with the commercial customer base and tripled the number of registered devices on the platform in commercial accounts. Initially, we expected a 50% higher growth rate, but with a sudden occurrence of COVID-19 and the way it affected the transportation industry, I am positive that we may be proud of such a growth rate.

We noticed a visible slowdown of business activity in a common world lockdown time ‐ March, April for the first wave and November, December (and still continues) for the second wave of COVID-19. You may notice a visible deviation of 2020 from 2109 on the chart that reflects our monthly support activities in flespi HelpBox:

activity in helpbox 2020 2019

Nevertheless, it was a great year for flespi. We finished December in our primary EU region with 99.99% uptime, which resulted in 99.978% yearly uptime for 2020. This is still a bit lower then in 99.986% in 2019 but again we have a strong reason for that - February was the worst ever month in our history with 1.5 hours downtime due to network connectivity which is the responsibility of our uplink provider. Most other short downtimes were caused by problems with network connectivity as well.

Among the great yearly achievements is the introduction of a new RU region which was able to provide from the very beginning and up until now a stable 100% uptime for all 10 months in a row.

Our target for 2021 will be to improve uptime numbers in the EU region and stay as close to 100% in the RU region as possible.

Back to December 2020 and some new features that were released by the flespi team.

  • We continued the development and enhancements of device plugins. Now it is possible to generate your own message fields on the fly using custom expressions that may reference other message fields. In the next stages of development, we plan to introduce message filtration and stable per-device message parameters cache to ensure that specified fields are always present in the device message.
  • Our flespi.io users should already notice the changes we introduced there. We simplified MQTT topics visualization for all flespi items and embedded MQTT Tiles directly into flespi.io with a one-mouse-click design of personal dashboards.
  • Toolbox, after a lot of attempts and iterations finally received a new interface. We hope that the new interface will make your flespi debugging experience even better.
  • And we integrated two new protocols into flespi. One is for Morey devices and another one is for Xirgo Global devices working over MQTT protocol. The last one is interesting by itself as it uses standard MQTT pub/sub sequences for transport layer with binary messages as a payload of MQTT messages.

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With that, the flespi team wants to sincerely wish you a productive, engaging, and surprising (in the finest sense of this word) year ahead!

May there be enough inspiration for business,

Enough time for family and friends,

Enough patience to stay sane in this hectic world,

And enough energy to live your life to the max!

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If you’ve read this post up to this point, you might be truly interested in what flespi brings to you every month. From our side, we want to learn better about what you already use and in what manner to better understand how else we can add value to flespi so that it translates well in the value for your business.


If you could spend 2 mins on a survey we would be immensely grateful.


Thanks for your loyalty and persistence!