July has passed and we have just a single summer month remaining in the northern hemisphere. In Lithuania, the weather for the whole month was in an ideal temperature range. And I hope this magical summer weather will remain for at least one more month.
On July 1, we celebrated reaching the mark of 300K registered devices on the flespi platform. As I promised, here are some pictures. From our office in Vilnius, made by Nadzeya:
And from the Minsk, made by Evgenij:
Believe me, the cakes were great!
Our monthly uptime in the EU region was 100% while in the RU region we had 39 seconds of network availability issue occurring on the 4th of July at night which led to the 99.9997% monthly uptime mark there. Actually, this was the very first downtime in the RU region since its official launch and it wasn’t reflected in the public NOC channel for the RU region due to the reporting Telegram bot configuration, but we already fixed this issue.
To make our operation even more transparent we created special flespi network status pages for the EU region and RU region that are hosted outside of region infrastructure, updated in real-time, and in case of any troubles, you may check live region status and network availability there. Please read a detailed description of what and how we monitor to be aware of any troubles that may occur to our service due to network outages all over the world.
The most significant feature we already installed at the very end of July is the new functionality for devices remote control. This was greatly inspired by a lot of scooter and bike-sharing platforms that recently started to use flespi for remote control of their devices. We decided to make a platform more suitable for them where real-time remote control of a bike or scooter is the most important operation. This functionality we will presented in an additional blog article and will update associated knowledge base articles, but in short what new features in the REST API you now have:
The controllable queue of commands for each separate device, same as already was available for channels;
Instant real-time commands to the connected device that will pause request up to specified timeout and provide REST API response with result directly from the device.
Together with this we also introduced in our PVM engine the new MQTT Broker feature. It means that the channel by itself can now act as MQTT Broker with its own URI where a remote device can be connected to. This provides much more control over connected devices compared to the existing mechanism where the channel was an ordinary MQTT client subscribed to some topics and could only catch messages published by devices. We will softly modify related protocols and will assist affected users to migrate seamlessly.
We integrated three new public protocols: thinkpower, lkgps, and okai.
A little bit of inside information you may catch in the article about how we organized the support process by our engineering team. It reveals the light on some of the tools we use in order to provide such quick and efficient support as we are doing.
Toolbox has been enhanced with analytics-related features and MQTT Tiles is now ready to use for smart home visualization.
The next important feature that you may expect in August is the migration of devices messages storage from second granularity to microseconds. Followed by the upgrade of related systems like analytics. Here you can read more details on the upcoming change.
From August 16th till 22nd we will gather our whole team from multiple worldwide locations in Vilnius for a week and discuss the past, the present, and the future of flespi. We really have a lot of important topics to speak about in order to effectively continue our worldwide expansion. That week we may be slow to respond in HelpBox, I apologize in advance for it.