Announcing the first Notecard Developer Firmware Release

Firmware
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Hello everyone!

Thank you all for being early adopters of the Notecard and for sharing your questions and issues with us here and with our support team. Since we launched in December, we’ve made a number of improvements to the Notecard firmware, and have added a few features to the API that many of you will find useful.

I’m happy to share that, as of today, we’ve cut a new developer version of the Notecard firmware (1.5.3) and it is now available for installation through Notehub DFU, or in manual “offline” mode. Read on for a summary of fixes and features, and for installation instructions.

Notecard v1.5.3 Release Notes

The following items have been added since Notecard v1.5.2.

  1. Notecard I2C request/response reliability improved when the I2C bus is shared among multiple devices.
  2. Added rearm and wireless modes to card.attn (details from dev.blues.io).
  3. Implemented minutes as a new response to card.location.mode to return the currently-configured ring-fence debounce period (details from dev.blues.io).
  4. To allow for long-range enclosed transportation use cases, Implemented an enhancement to suppress motion-induced Notecard wakeup when repeated network connectivity failures occur.
  5. Added a warning to _health.qo if battery voltage is low or dead, at most once per day.
  6. Implemented card.random function to obtain a single or buffer full of random numbers from the Notecard hardware RNG (details from dev.blues.io).
  7. Miscellaneous bug fixes and reliability improvements for devices communicating over I2C and those running in continuous communications mode.

Installation Instructions

Every Notecard sold since December 7, 2020 comes pre-installed with v1.5.2. If your projects communicate with the Notecard over I2C, you are using continuous mode in hub.set, or if you need any of the other fixes or features detailed above, we recommend updating the firmware on your devices.

There are two ways to update your Notecard firmware.

  1. With an over-the-air DFU from Notehub.io. This process is the simplest way to get the new firmware on your device, and is documented here. Please be aware that this approach does use data in your data plan.
  2. By performing a manual flash over USB with a terminal program and the STM32CubeProgrammer toolchain. See here for step-by-step instructions for this approach and download the 1.5.3 Release binary here (460.2 KB))

Feel free to ping us here if you have any questions, and good luck with your Notecard projects!

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Thanks, I just started using the Feather Starter Kit and the Firmware installation through Notehub DFU is quite easy. Looking forward to developing with this starter kit.

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Great, glad to hear that @aott33, and welcome to the community! Let us know how it goes, and if you have any questions.

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