The hottest summer time now is in Vilnius and the flespi team was also fanned by the great European heatwave. In contrast to most other EU countries Lithuania is 100% independent from Russian oil and gas, which means we can use both air conditioning and lighting at the same time. Did you know that people in Australia and even Japan could not use those two simultaneously in peak-time? Uuuh, the world is going crazy nowadays…
Nevertheless, the Netherlands are also self-sufficient in power supply, our datacenter has great power redundancy and has been operating in June without interruption (like every single month for the past 20 years since it was constructed). The flespi platform that is running in that facility finished June with 100% uptime and I have nothing to add on top of this number.
Our primary activity in June was a long awaited two-day team meeting with strategic discussion about the current and the future of flespi. We have made short- and long-term decisions, redefined some points in our strategy and set up targets for 2022-2024.
The main focus for our team will remain on the so-called “base” functionality. This is all about bidirectional middleware where flespi is located between devices and applications. This is the part used by 95% of our users and we want it to be as simple as possible and at the same time as powerful as possible. We want to deliver maximum durability and avoid device reconnects when we install newer versions of the gateway module or upgrade the protocol. We want full transparency about our upcoming protocol changes. We want to simplify flespi connection to other platforms. And we will design the easiest possible onboarding process for new flespi users.
We decided that our next “big” feature will be an automation system — so-called lambda scripts in the cloud world. This system will be capable of defining custom event handlers generated by flespi and triggering sets of actions to automate platform behavior without the need to host a script somewhere. We plan the initial delivery of this system in Q1 2023.
The tangible part of our work in June was about protocol enhancements. One by one, but we fixed parsing errors, integrated new devices and added new settings for 17 protocols.
We’ve added one new plugin type — google-wifi-geolocation — that allows resolving position data from Wi-Fi routers MAC address information.
We’ve also introduced changes in the flespi.io GUI where we added the possibility to login with standard tokens. Our next plan is to add the possibility to login with ACL tokens that will enable you to share a great viewer/editor of some flespi entities (e.g. devices) outside of your account.
And last but not least is the IoT Project of the Year competition held by Gurtam. Flespi-driven projects are always high-ranked in this competition and I recommend you submit an application with your project. In return you can receive great promotion by the world media that usually highlight this event. By the way, among the winners in 2021 there were several flespi-driven projects.
And yes, at the beginning of June we completely shut down our services in Russia and stopped the datacenter there. Some day, in the far future, I hope, the country will change its values towards the democratic mindset…
July and August are the hottest months in Eastern Europe and I wish you to enjoy this vacation time. But please also remember about the war in Ukraine with hundreds if not thousands of people dying there each day. Please donate just a hundred euro for an extra bayraktar or to humanitarian aid and together we will stop that war faster.