Despite the cold Lithuanian weather, for flespi, November was likely the most productive month of the year. This is evidenced by an unbeatable 100% monthly uptime mark.
The most important functionality released is, of course, video telematics. Working with video in the GPS tracking and fleet management industry has never been as easy as it is now with flespi. I suggest you read this article thoroughly and consider integrating video functionality into your application or platform if you're already using flespi. The initial list of supported video hardware includes Howen, Streamax, Concox, and Teltonika. We will add Queclink to this list soon.
Another significant feature is the metadata field that we added to almost every flespi entity, including tokens. In the metadata, you can store any kind of data you want — for example, a link to an icon image in the device or your user ID in the token. We allow you to store in metadata up to 64 keys, with the total stringified JSON size up to 64KB. Metadata can be used to select corresponding items for REST API operations or just to attach some additional application-specific information to a flespi entity.
Here, I would also like to highlight — just in case you missed it — a very valuable article for those who are using flespi via REST API: an overview of REST API selectors by Jan, packed with a few useful samples that can greatly simplify your code.
Finally, the pvm-code plugin received long-awaited enhancements as well. We enabled access from the PVM code to device telemetry, its current settings, and of course, newly released metadata. Now, PVM code is the most powerful type of plugin, covering the functionality of all other plugins.
During recent experiments with AI, flespi achieved clean PVM code generation in response to natural language requests, a significant step that could potentially streamline coding for users. This AI-generated PVM code is still undergoing validation and requires the development of specific embedded knowledge, but the goal is to create a tool that efficiently generates PVM code from natural language input.
In parallel with this, we experimented with OpenAI and its latest GPT-4-turbo model with embedded knowledge about flespi. The knowledge was loaded from our Knowledge Base, blog, and forum. There is a noticeable difference between the answers of human assistants and AI. However, with embedded flespi-focused knowledge, the AI assistant can really help with some questions. Here you may read the question and the proposed answer in two samples.
We are considering how to provide such a prompt to our users directly in their flespi.io account to improve their efficiency and simplify their experience with flespi. What you might sometimes hesitate to ask a human, is much easier to pose to an AI, especially when you know it is AI.
Regarding flespi analytics, we finally bundled the updates since August and published an overview of its new capabilities. As I mentioned at the flespi conference - flespi analytics is a hidden gem that can help you save thousands of dollars monthly, so please keep an eye on it.
We published two more articles related to our September conference - a UI workshop by Jan and Evgenij, and 'flespi as Data and Integration Hub' by Sergei. We concluded that set of articles with only two more presentations left unpublished - the very first one and the last. These will remain exclusive to conference attendees.
We integrated the 1NCE SMS service as a modem in flespi.
The HTTP stream from flespi to your application now has the option to compress traffic during HTTP POST operations. With around 1000 such streams publishing 150,000 messages each minute, if you are interested in decreasing traffic to your server, you can read here how to achieve this by setting the corresponding HTTP header in the response.
And Nadzeya Mikhailava, after a long year, has finally returned to our team from her maternity leave - full of energy and fresh ideas to empower our team's throughput.
In December, we will continue with video telematics, finalize the MediaBox tool, and enrich our platform with FTP file receivers that some protocols require. Also, we want to enhance the realms authorization system to finally enable login with custom corporate SSO services.
And yes, yes - Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you! 🎄