So much to share from this sprint!
The last two weeks have been a whirlwind.
First of all, we have a new blog! Welcome.
Web IDE
Three new features: you can now claim, unclaim, and rename Cores through Spark Build.
Other improvements:
- Clearer error messages on Flash/Verify
- Case insensitive usernames
- Flash automatically saves
- Verify and Flash are ten times faster!
- We incorporated the winning makefile feature bounty pull request from Matt Anderson into the compile server.
- We don’t recompile your firmware if you haven’t edited the code. First hitting Verify, then hitting Flash now only results in one compile cycle.
Documentation
We added some great docs to help users better
understand the colors of the RGB LED on the Core.
- On the “Connecting your Core” page,
there’s a new, highly detailed section called
Troubleshooting by Color
that helps you understand exactly what’s happening. - On the “Getting Started” page, in
Step 3,
we added a click-through animation of the Core’s flashing/breathing LED
to show all the steps one sees when setting up a Core the first time.
There’s also a
new annotated example
showing how to do local communicaton with your Core.
Simple example servers
are on GitHub in ruby and node.js.
Two big forum posts in case you missed them:
Firmware Improvements
You now have control over the RGB LED on the Core!
To stop breathing cyan and turn it red for half a second:
RGB.control(true);
RGB.color(255, 0, 0);
delay(500);
RGB.control(false);
We’ll add this to the docs soon, but the arguments
to RGB.color() are red, green, and blue values 0–255.
We also improved the USB Serial Wi-Fi credentials tool;
it now supports WPA2, WPA, WEP and unsecured networks.
Newly implemented Arduino/Wiring functions:
- delayMicroseconds()
- micros()
- shiftIn()
- shiftOut()
Also, you can now easily get your Core ID in firmware with Spark.deviceID().
We released an open source patch programmer for upgrading the CC3000 firmware.
We improved the stability of over-the-air firmware updates in the face of lossy networks.
Cloud
You can check the health status of the Spark Cloud at
status.spark.io
We squashed some memory leaks in the Device Service
so your Core connection is now stable for longer.
Mobile Apps
The Android app can now handle unsecured Wi-Fi networks.
Open sourcing the mobile apps is high on the priority list,
but we’re blocked by licensing issues right now.
More info in January, but we will likely release
the Android app first and the iOS app later.
