Particle Matter: Updates from Sprint 41

Particle Updates
1

Updates from Sprint 41!

tl;dr Photon pre-orders shipped, firmware release imminent

Hardware Team

  • All of the Photon pre-orders have been shipped! W00t!
  • By the end of this week, we’ll have finished manufacturing another large batch of Photons to fulfill ongoing orders.
  • We identified a potential issue with light sensitivity on the voltage regulators for the Electron that may cause a change to the voltage regulator we’re using…more updates forthcoming
  • We’ve got a strong antenna design on the Electron. To make the certification process as smooth as possible, we’re working closely with the radio and the antenna manufacturer.
  • We’re working on the Electron’s software library for power management, there will be a lot of options that can be fine tuned in firmware to optimize power consumption for specific applications.

Software Team

  • The latest firmware release candidate is in full testing and certification mode. things are looking good and we’ll be releasing it soon. If you want an early look, you can check it out in the public firmware repository.
  • Last sprint, we bumped the cloud compiler (arm-none-eabi-gcc) version from 4.8.4 to 4.9.3. It turns out that version 4.9.3 was bloating the size of firmware on the Spark Core, making it too big to fit in some cases, so we rolled it back to 4.8.4 while we work out some optimization settings.
  • We’ve created some new API endpoints for managing passwords and authentication to make it easier for people to create products on top of Particle.
  • Started iOS development of the Electron setup process.
  • The Internet Button, Neopixel and HTTP libraries all got some Photon compatibility fixes.
  • We made progress on the web browser based SoftAP setup for Photons.

Business Team

  • We hired Heather Brundage to lead out on operations, logistics, and soon, partnerships. Welcome, Heather! We’re all super stoked to add her to the Particle family!
  • We’re starting to build out a new store that will give us more control of the experience and give people more visibility into the shipping status of their orders (among many other improvements).
  • @christine and @will chatted on Particle Interactions and it was fun. It spawned this blog post / transcript!
  • We added a section on the docs about how to use our GitHub repos.
  • We have Polls now. They are a fun and awesome suggestion from the brainvault of @moors7.
  • @christine let her obsessive organization instincts get the better of her and color-coded the community categories, now lots of things are orange
  • We planned out some improvements to the community experience, coming soon to an Internet near you!
2 Likes
3

Do you know if these new endpoints are documented somewhere?

(Update: I found this link in another post)

4

With regard to the arm-none-eabi-gcc 4.9.3 version issue.

If the Spark Core firmware ends up to big will it simply not upload (Local build) or will it perhaps upload fine and then the core hard faults when trying access the missing code?

5

If the firmware is too big, it won’t be linked or built - there will be no binary to flash, and you’ll see a error message saying something like section .text overflowed. So no danger of flashing only part of an image that’s too large.

6

Thanks for the clarification.