The last spring month was warm and calm for flespi. We achieved 99.998% platform uptime in May, which is not as cool as a 100% we had in April, but still very decent. The only 56-second downtime was due to network connectivity issues outside the scope of our competence.
- A major event across Europe and the entire world was the GDPR law coming into force. As well as many others, you might have been flooded with hundreds of emails from various services prompting you to revise their updated policies and accept them. We are law-abiding, so we also contributed to this flood :) We published our privacy policy and required users who want to continue or start using flespi to accept it. At the same time the GDPR law required European companies to establish contractual relations with all their subcontractors to conform with it, which expanded our customer base a bit +)
- For Telematics hub we implemented new protocols:
calamp andomnicom -rpc , and extensively worked on adding even more configuration settings for the most popular devices from Queclink, Concox, Teltonika and other manufacturers. - We have opened our Youtube channel and uploaded a few basic video instructions on how to use flespi. At the same time these video guides are automatically available on https://flespi.io (in the left-side menu), so you don’t need to go to Youtube to watch them.
- As I promised we implemented the state of all flespi elements in MQTT as retained messages and also added the possibility to wrap HTTP REST calls with MQTT, so once you have a token, you can use pure MQTT to communicate with flespi. These features are still experimental, we are testing them on various projects, so some topic or data format may change before official release. But if you are interested, subscribe to “flespi/state/#” topic and monitor the changes there.
- We’ve started a massive transformation project in our telematics gateway, in particular, we want to split transport out of our PVM technology, which we plan to accomplish in June. Even though this internal project should not impact you, the amount of work is enormous, and this will be probably the case when we will post a notification to our NOC Telegram channel before installing such update. Just in case. This split will allow us to use many kinds of special transport and it will even be possible to use telematics devices for transport purposes to deliver some data to the serial port. This will simplify attachment of Tachograph, video/photo cameras, and Garmin devices to the telematics trackers.
- At the same time, we plan to introduce a built-in chat into https://flespi.io so that any flespi user could contact our engineers live at any time. We believe that immediate response to any requests from our users, especially those related to technical issues, is a demonstration of respect and care about the business of our clients and their clients. So far we’ve been using e-mail and Telegram as our primary communication channels, and want to make another step forward in improving the quality of our support.
- We are thinking of making a few integrations of flespi as a data source to other solutions. We intend to connect flespi to BI and IoT tools by large companies with proprietary products, like Google, Microsoft, AWS, as well as to smaller open-source solutions.
If by any chance, you have time, possibility, and desire to talk to us in person, you are welcome to meet our team at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany on June 12-15.