plan44.ch

Firmware 1.6.8

Firmware 1.6.8 for P44-LC devices is a maintenance release for firmware release 1.6. It contains some general improvements and bug fixes.

Note that this update is always needed as an intermediary step to firmware 1.7.0 and beyond. So, please check for new firmware again after installing this version, there might be a newer firmware already.

General Recommendation for updates: before updating, please always use the "Download configuration backup" button to download a backup of your device's configuration.

Changes since production version 1.6.6

Bugfixes

• click handling: dimming no longer stops running scene actions (especially for scene scripts providing effects that should be ongoing but still be dimmable)
• Animators: fixed bug that caused spurious glitches (animators seemingly not running or running too fast)
• upgrading: ready for upgrading to 1.7.0 and beyond, which expands the /boot partition from 20M to 64M. Installing 1.6.8 is required as an intermediate step in all cases. Please check for updates again after installing.

Improvements

• Enocean: add support for D2-07-00 door lock status profile.
• Channel transitions: improved wraparound channels (such as "hue") to allow full circle transitions in one step.
• Analogio: Added CWWW lights, add WebUI support for creating Linux-PWMChip-based lights.
• p44lrgraphics: add support for multiple fonts, for now 7x5 and 8x5 but mechanism in place for bigger sizes, add support for french accent characters with basic mechanism in place for handling any UTF-8 codepoint in fonts.
• p44script: added foreach statement
• p44script: answer() functions for web requests and feature requests now also accept an error value as argument to send back to the API caller.
• p44script: Added digitalbus() to combine multiple GPIOs to input or output a digital value
• p44script: all time getter functions such as hour(), month(), sunrise() etc. now accept a epoch timestamp argument. Also epochtime() function allows constructing epoch timestamps from date components.
• LED chains: more led layout (R,G,B,W ordering) options
• LED chains: reworked update timing engine, is now more precise, issues log warnings when display is likely to be jumpy or flickering due to limits in max LED output frame rate.
• LED chains on RaspberryPi: can now explicitly specify gpio21 (for using PCM), gpio10 (for using SPI) and optionally gpio18 (for using PWM, this was the only option supported before).

Firmware 1.6.5 for P44-LC devices is a maintenance release for firmware release 1.6. It contains some general improvements and bug fixes, as well as some additional p44script capabilities.

General Recommendation for updates: before updating, please always use the "Download configuration backup" button to download a backup of your device's configuration.

Improvements since production version 1.6.4

General

• Text is now easier to select and copy in the web interface (in some browsers, text could only be selected via right-click before).
• More precise output transition timing, multiple channels can now be in differently timed transitions at the same time for hardware devices which support that.
• Evaluators: more intuitive behaviour when on/off conditions logically overlap (are both true at the same time), improved logging to make understanding evaluator condition evaluation easier.
• Foundation laid for the P44-xx device to possibly act as a matter bridge in the future.

Bugfixes

• Assigning a very long name for the P44-xx device could cause dns-sd not being able to publish and thus device would not appear in Bonjour or Avahi network browsers. Now long names are automatically shortened to prevent this.

p44script

• Added bit(field) manipulation functions: bit(), setbit(), flipbit().
• Added lowercase(), uppercase(), caseinsensitive option for find() and new replace() function for string manipulation.
• Added cquote() function.
• Added withmeta and formdata options to httprequest(). Also, httprequest() now treats all "success" class status codes (200..203) as ok, not just 200.
• Added dnssdbrowse() function to search for named public services in the local network using dns-sd (aka Bonjour, aka zeroconf, aka avahi).
• Added annotation() function to get the annotation string of a value (which for example often indicates the reason for a result being null/undefined).
• Added globalbuiltins() and contextbuiltins() functions listing all built-in global or context-level functions/objects.
• Boolean operators now return "real" boolean values, i.e. not just generic numeric 0 or 1, but actual bool type (which still converts to numeric 1 value for true, 0 for false). The main difference is that these "real" booleans, when assigned to JSON object fields, are actually represented as JSON booleans, not numbers.

Scripted devices/external device API

• Buttons now can directly report clicks and longpress (useful when the button device already has it's own click detection, which might be more precise than transmitting direct button press/release events via an API that might add too much delay).
• New "Feature" keyevents: this feature allows getting events from pressing and releasing keys from a linux /dev/input/xx device (P44-LC-X only).

Firmware 1.6.4 for P44-LC/AC devices is a maintenance release for firmware release 1.6. It essentially releases support for specific hardware, and includes some improvements and bug fixes.

General Recommendation for updates: before updating, please always use the "Download configuration backup" button to download a backup of your device's configuration.

Improvements since production version 1.6.2

hue

• Ready for upcoming hue bridge firmware release (expected for Q2/2022) which removes SSDP method for finding hue bridge in the local network. New method is DNS-SD (also called Bonjour, mDNS, ZeroConf). SSDP is still supported for old (round) hue bridges.

EnOcean

• Fixed F6-05-02 smoke detector learn-in.

General

• Fixed bugs that could occur in some edge cases such that scene transitions would not work as expected.
• Web-UI: Fixed custom transition time scene effect to show the parameter field, so transition time can actually be edited.
• Internal Action Evaluator trigger conditions are now re-evaluated after action script has run to detect script side effects (such as changing a script variable) that might be needed to reset the trigger condition.
• Shadow devices should now get proper UI in digitalSTROM (added resp. modelfeatures)
• Support for new p44-mini-e+l hardware platform.

Logging

• Scene operations now have a text description for the scene involved (such as "preset 1" for scene number 5).
• There is now a toggle to have log display wrap long lines
• Better error display showing not only numeric error code, but also name text.

p44script

• restartapp() now can optionally also reboot, shutdown or start a firmware upgrade.
• Fixed inconsistencies in member access, for example assigning variables via globalvars()['name'] = xx.
• New functions isok(), ifok() to catch errors for example when accessing data fields, strrep() for creating string with repeating patterns.
• signal() now can send data, which allows using it as a "pipe" to transmit information between different script contexts and threads.
• User defined functions can now be created as "local function" to keep them private to the context (e.g. device, mainscript) instead of exposing them globally. Also, for clarity, functions may now be declared "global function".
• New functions maxblocktime() and maxruntime() for controlling script execution time slice and overall max run time.
• Fixed crash that could happen when run time error occurred within nested function calls.
• httprequest() now allows accessing servers using basic auth (because that is needed by some IoT hardware not capable of digest auth). By default, httprequest() does not suggest basic auth and allows it only in SSL connections when the server asks for it.
• Internal: the event passing mechanism (on which on(..) {...} is based) has been significantly improved and generalized. This also fixes a few edge cases that could cause inconsistencies with events in too rapid succession.
• Webserver: now allows (but never requests) accessing via http basic auth. This allows IoT hardware not capable of digest auth to still access the web API. Note that basic auth risks exposing the password when used without https/TLS.
• API endpoint `/api/json/scriptapi` which can be activated via p44script is now accessible without `rqvaltok`token.

P44-LC-X: free do-it-yourself version of the standalone plan44 light controller

See https://plan44.ch/automation/p44-lc-x.php for more information