1 April, 2020

March 2020 change log

Major flespi improvements in March 2020

During the COVID-19 pandemic when most of us are locked down at our houses and all media sources are generating negative news with a machine gun performance, let me be positive.

First of all, the flespi uptime in March. Now we have two numbers — one for the EU region (default for most of you) and another one for the RU region

The EU region finished March with 99.9935% uptime. We had two downtimes with a total duration of 174 seconds due to the maintenance operations of our uplink provider that carried fixes for the problems we had with the uplink in February

The RU region finished March with 100% uptime. At the moment there are more than 200 users in this region and flespi was available for them without interruptions for the whole March. A great achievement for the very first month just after the region was opened for the registrations.

  • After many years of being a team of nine, we finally got one more team member. Sergei Leuchanka located in Boston, USA joins our team in April and will be responsible for raising awareness of the flespi platform among hardware manufacturers, connectivity providers, software developers, and telematics service providers.
  • We gathered some big data and created a map updated daily with the transportation mileage stats for each country. After looking at the impact of the new virus on our transportation industry we launched a special COVID-19 rescue campaign to do whatever we can in order to stop the virus. Together with some partners we established the COVID-19 IoT Alliance and are working on some applications together. The updates are posted on this forum thread.
  • We have a lot of new staff for flespi analytics. First of all, we implemented various accumulating counters, e.g. mileage, engine hours, driving time — analytics is now capable of accumulating and resetting a specified interval whatever you may need in your applications. And we published the latest all-in-one overview of what flespi analytics is capable of at the moment with lots of links to new articles in the flespi KB and blog.
  • flespi toolbox received a major rewrite of its history/real-time modes and now operates seamlessly. As we didn’t get too many questions about the change, it seems quite usable. And one more bonus for analytics users — now toolbox can visualize original device messages highlighting those that are inside the selected interval.
  • We decided to deprecate one protocol — dynafleet originally used to connect to Volvo Dynafleet due to the expiration of the current API and a limited number of interested users. 
  • We are very close to delivering the greatest feature for every engineer who works in the telematics industry — the possibility to access the raw traffic of each device for each protocol. You will not need to use proxy channels anymore. All the traffic passing through each particular channel sorted by the device identifier will be available for the limited number of days and up to a certain storage size. This is already available to use for all flespi users — in toolbox, there is a traffic button that will launch a special window. The tool itself is in live development, we are tuning some parts and will present the final version later in April. But still, you may enjoy it already.
  • And flespi MQTT Broker got its own set of updates. One is related to small IoT devices that have a size limit on their broker authorization fields and another one for the developers relying on HASD.
  • In April we continue the development of settings management over UDP and soon will switch the calamp protocol to the new pvmII engine and implement remote settings management. We also are very close to releasing the firmware over the air function for some protocols, please stay tuned for protocols changelog.

If you are locked down in your house these days and everything seems paralyzed, please take this time to educate yourself, explore new technologies and think, think, think a lot. Wish you to stay healthy!