This October was fully packed with events. While the whole world watched the pending U.S. election, set to shape political and economic decisions for millions of people and thousands of businesses, nature played its own part with the tragic events in Spain, sadly taking lives. And although there are no such catastrophes in Lithuania, I believe it’s our main responsibility as a Tier-1 telematics data provider to help thousands of fleet owners decarbonize their operations.
In October, our uptime was 100%. Such high uptime is especially valuable since we’ve upgraded quite a lot of older servers with new hardware, effectively replacing those that have been running since as far back as 2016. Ultimately, we decided to upgrade older parts of our infrastructure due to notable performance differences between modern and older CPUs.
The most significant part of our 2024 roadmap is Tachograph-related functionality in flespi. We started rolling it out gradually in October and will publish an article with details by the end of November. Here’s a quick preview:
The first tacho-integrated manufacturer is Ruptela with Queclink following soon (in active testing already), and Teltonika to be integrated by the end of this year. You can find the list of tacho-enabled devices on flespi at this link.
Tacho functionality is supported by the channel configured with the specialized tacho-bridge protocol that enables smart card authentication. For each company card, you'll need to register an associated flespi device.
We released and will maintain an open-source Tacho Bridge App that provides remote access to company card readers through your flespi account. Released under the MIT license, you're free to fork and modify it. The app is platform-agnostic and should work with tacho card hotels as well. We also maintain ready-to-use releases for Windows and MacOS that you can provide to fleet owners.
The smart card authentication system is not exclusive to the tacho-bridge protocol, meaning we can integrate it with other Tacho solutions supporting this functionality. flespi’s role here is to provide a durable link from the vehicle tachograph to the company card to authenticate the GPS tracker, enabling it to read and send the ddd file automatically, without manual involvement.
Downloaded files are stored in the device media and can be retrieved via API into third-party storage. Initially, we're focusing on durable ddd file retrieval, but with a dedicated device plugin, we will later extract detailed data from these files and provide it in a parsed format.
The price for tachograph functionality is minimal. You only pay for extra channels (at least one required), additional devices (one per company card), and additional storage for ddd files.
We are currently rolling out this functionality, so please bear with us for any bugs and await the upcoming blog article detailing tachograph integration instructions.
Another development track in our 2024 roadmap is genAI. In October, we upgraded codi’s primary agent LLM model to claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022 by Anthropic, raising its intelligence level significantly. If you haven’t tried it yet, now’s a great time — you’re likely to be impressed with the responses. Just be sure to apply these tips for effective communication with codi. The second part of our genAI track is the devices assistant. Now, it can be integrated into your support portal, ERP, CRM, or even as a function tool for your LLM if needed.
The third major update applies to the flespi analytics engine. We supported calculators for geofences assigned directly to devices, added functions to find items in JSON arrays, enhanced event handling for activated/deactivated cases, and enabled access to the previous interval for ongoing calculations.
We’re not only adding new functionality but also phasing out legacy parts. Make sure to update any usage of the deprecated calc_id parameter in the POST /gw/devices/xxx/calculate API call, which is scheduled for deprecation in mid-January 2025.
We implemented a new plugin type - msg-param-calibrate. This plugin is used to convert device parameter values using an actual measurement table. It's especially useful for calibrating fuel levels in LLS sensors, though the stepwise linear function it provides is applicable beyond just LLS.
We’ve released a major update for our open-source GPS tracking tool TrackIt - version 2.0. With a redesigned UI, it now supports tracking multiple devices on the same map.
We integrated a new totemtech protocol (and tacho-bridge protocol, of course).
As part of our security improvements, we released a feature to specify allowed origins for tokens. We are also working on adding this functionality for tokens issued during realm authentication. Setting correct origins is essential; for example, you can limit token use to server environments only. Any misuse of this token in an image or link will fail in modern browsers and applications.
We added the storage cdns subsystem to flespi, bringing popular features like metadata, grants, and enhanced CDN logs for precise monitoring of access to your stored files.
If you’re still eager for more updates, check out The Dark Side of Telematics Backend, a presentation I gave in September at Gurtam DevConf. It offers an inside look at flespi architecture, explaining both how and why we’ve set up our backend this way.
In November, we’ll continue rolling out Tachograph functionality as our primary focus.
P.S. No matter who wins the U.S. election, everything will be fine with our world. We just need to end wars that claim thousands of lives daily and prioritize decarbonization, which is becoming increasingly critical to our daily lives. Stay safe!
With all that done, we’re excited to move on to November!