Altos1.6

Sat, 07 Feb 2015 23:57:15 -0800
tags/rockets

AltOS 1.6 — TeleDongle v3.0 support and bug fixes

Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 1.6.

AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of firmware for our cc1111, STM32L151, STMF042, LPC11U14 and ATtiny85 based electronics and Java-based ground station software.

This is a major release of AltOS, including support for our new TeleDongle v3.0 board and a selection of bug fixes

AltOS Firmware — TeleDongle v3.0 added along with some fixes

Our updated ground station, TeleDongle v3.0, works just like the original TeleDongle, but is an all-new design:

CC1200 radio chip is about 5dB more sensitive than TeleDongle's CC1111.

LPC11U14 CPU can be reprogrammed over the USB link.

AltOS Bug Fixes

We also fixed a few bugs in the firmware:

Make sure the startup flight computer beeps are consistent. Sometimes, it was taking long enough to beep out the battery voltage that the flight computer state was changing in the middle, causing a bit of confusion.

Change TeleDongle's LED indicators during telemetry reception. The green LED blinks on successful packet reception, and the red LED blinks when a packet with an invalid checksum is received.

The SPI driver used in both TeleDongle v3 and TeleGPS has been rewritten to avoid locking up under heavy CPU load. If you've got a TeleGPS board, you'll want to reflash with new firmware.

AltosUI and TeleGPS applications

A few minor new features are in this release

AltosUI can now compute and display tilt angle when graphing eeprom log data from TeleMega and EasyMega.

The AltosUI tool window is shown when starting with a data file. This way, when you double-click on a file in the file manager, you'll get the whole AltosUI interface, rather than just the graphing window.

At the end of replaying an old log file, stick 'done' in the Age field so you can tell the recording is over.

Bug Fixes

There are a bunch of minor bug fixes, including the usual collection of attempts to make stuff behave better on Windows platforms.

Use a different Windows API to discover USB device ids. This works better on my new HP Windows 7 machine. Maybe it will work better for other people too?

Look in more places in the Windows registry to try and find the installed Java version. It appears that the default Java download from Oracle is a 32-bit version? In any case, that version sticks its install information in a different spot in the registry.

Fix file associations on Windows when Java isn't installed in the system root.

Make 'Scan Channels' work better with new AltOS firmware which only reports device configuration information once ever five seconds.