Hello from the Particle team!
It's been a while since our last "Gen 3 improvements update" last December, which documents the progress and priorities of the team working to improve the development experience of our Gen 3 hardware.
Here’s a roundup of updates since last December, and a sneak peak at what’s coming down the pipe:
1. Where we’re at
Feedback on rc.27
Generally, the feedback from the community was that v080-rc.27
improved the stability of the Gen 3 development experience for most of you. Here are the results of the previous survey.
- 65% of you said that
rc.27
made the development experience better. - Interestingly, the score of 5.88 / 10 represented a slight decline over
rc.26
(which received an average score of 6.08 / 10).
As a result of this feedback, we’ve continued to focus our development efforts on improving the stability and completeness of the Gen 3 development experience.
2. What’s coming next
Device OS v0.9.0
We’re in the process of testing a new Device OS release for Gen 3 devices which will be released under the v0.9.0
line.
Note that this release was previously named
v080-rc.28
in conversation on the forums.
As we already stated, this release is primarily focused on stability and completeness of the Gen 3 development experience, as opposed to new features. Here are some of the notable headlines in that release:
-
Sleep modes
We’re adding support for
STANDBY
andSTOP
modes for Gen 3 devices.Note that the RTC of the nRF52840 does not continue operating in STANBY mode, so it will not be possible out-of-box to wake the device from STANDBY mode after a fixed period of time. It will be possible to wake the device with either a falling edge on the RESET pin or a rising edge on WKP pin (D8), or after a fixed duration in STOP mode.
The user APIs for these features will be exactly the same as the implementation for Gen 2 devices. If you’re not familiar with the APIs, you can check them out here:
-
Cellular.command()
supportWe’ve implemented the full set of
cellular.command()
APIs available for Gen 2 devices which unlock the full capabilities of the Boron's onboard cellular modem. Existing documentation about theCellular.command()
API can be found in our documentation, here. -
General bug fixes and stability improvements
We’ve fixed a bunch of bugs that should resolve some issues reported with Gen 3 devices. The release should resolve the following issues listed on our “Particle Mesh Known Issues and Fixes” post, here:
-
Device Issue #2 – SYSTEM_MODE(MANUAL) and SEMI_AUTOMATIC not working properly
-
Device Issue – Resolved NCP lockup issue present in
rc.27
-
v0.9.0
is currently being tested by our internal team and a new Gen 3 Customer Council which has been formed to help us enhance our product development process with customer feedback from individuals in our community just like you.
3. Still in development
As we noted at the end of last year, we’re still working on a handful of high priority features and improvements that will further enhance the Gen 3 development experience. We don't have release dates for these features yet, but all are in various stages of progress.
Gen 3 stability
- Back-porting LTE improvements in Device OS 1.0.1 for Gen 3 hardware
- Issues listed in our pinned "Known Issues" list
Gen 3 completeness
- Support for over the wire / CLI setup flows for Gen 3 hardware
- End device support for Argons / Borons in a Mesh network
- Debugging support for Gen 3 hardware in Particle Workbench
New features for Gen 3
- Bluetooth support
- Support for High Availability networks (Mesh networks with backup / redundant border routers)
More to come this week / next as we prepare the v0.9.0
release! Feel free to ask questions / comments below.
Will