I was looking at https://github.com/particle-iot/device-os/releases and noticed that the recent firmware releases for electron look a bit different than the other device builds, in that only the electron build have the “+debug.bin” suffix. Is there something special about these releases for the electron compared to the other devices?
I am specifically looking at the 1.2.1-rc3 release. Usually “debug” builds have extra debug symbols that take up more firmware space and generally considered not ideal for production use. Are these binaries considered good (release candidate status not withstanding) for using in production situations?
Hey Mike,
Great question.
Historically for Gen 2 devices (Photon/Electron), we have always built our binaries that are released in our device-OS github repository a little bit different than the ones received OTA. The difference is that our Github releases have had debugging enabled by default whereas our OTA/safe-mode healer ones do not.
Technically speaking, nothing has changed with these +debug builds compared to previous device OS releases. The only difference is we are now being more explicit in our naming convention that these builds are, in fact, debug.
For most folks, this won’t make a difference. However, if you are making use of I2C or certain serial outputs–it may interfere to use these over the OTA versions. You can also make your own binary by building a non debug version through Workbench.
In the future, we will be considering releasing non debug versions through the device OS repository.
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