Autosport Labs is proud and excited to announce the availability of the 2.10.0 firmware for both RaceCapture/Pro and our new RaceCapture product line. Wow… this has been a big one for us: over 60,000 lines of code were altered. But the results are fantastic including a new product line, WiFi support, an overhaul to our SD card library and tons of other improvements. You can get it from our software download page and follow our upgrade instructional video here.
RaceCapture Support
The official firmware release for RaceCapture is finally here; which means you Kickstarter backers should be getting excited in anticipation of receiving your units. We have taken a lot of the feedback we got from our beta testers in the field and applied it to this final release. This helped work out many subtle bugs and lead to a stable and streamlined experience on the new product line. A big shout out to all of the beta testers who gave us feedback and reported issue. It’s because of folks like you that we can continue to build solid products. THANK YOU!
WiFi Support
We now officially support WiFi as a method of configuring and streaming telemetry between your RaceCapture or RaceCapture/Pro and tablet/laptop. To make use of it you will need to be on application version 1.7.6 or higher. The implications of this are grand. With WiFi support we now have another option besides Bluetooth for wireless streaming and configuration. This is great because Bluetooth traditionally has low range and can be unstable depending on the tablet’s software. WiFi, being an open standard, tends to be a lot more robust and reliable, and also has a greater range than traditional Bluetooth. And in addition to more range and stability, WiFi support lays the foundation for us to be able to expand onto the iOS platform. Work on that is underway, and we are excited that the opportunity is now available to support this family of devices.
User Feedback In Action
You spoke and we listened. This release contains fixes for several issues that users reported to us in the field. Changes include a distance calculation that is based on the integral of speed; drastically improving distance measurements in the event of GPS location hiccups. We have improved GPS communications stability so that its faster to start and less likely to fail. We have even made Lua more friendly by allowing for no scripting input. The result being a better product based on your input. Do keep coming with suggestions.
Improvements for SD cards
One of the most challenging features we have had with RaceCapture/Pro is the SD card subsystem. SD cards are great and extremely flexible, especially when it comes to having a low cost medium to record you lap data too. But they can be notoriously hard to get to work sometimes. Well we are happy to announce that the 2.10.0 firmware includes a complete overhaul of the SD card subsystem on RaceCapture/Pro. The new SD card driver has proven to be faster and much more robust than its predecessor, leading to an overall better experience for customers. Cards that users sent to us that demonstrated issues now work well under the new system, and corruption of data has been all but eliminated. We are very happy with these results, and hope you will be too.
A Focus on Stability
In addition to new features mentioned above, we pushed hard this release to really up the bar on system stability. Logging is imperative to getting better out on the track, and it’s really hard to get good data if your logger isn’t stable. So this release features implementation of an aggressive assert system internally, allowing us to expose bugs that may be hidden among in the code. This lead us to finding and fixing more than 10 separate issues that could have lead to system instability given the correct circumstances. We also increased the number of units tests by 47% (130 in 2.9.2 to 192 in 2.10.0), helping us spot issues earlier and adding confidence to our release process.
Get the Firmware Now
You can download the firmware from our software download page. Don’t forget to also check out our upgrade instructional video on how to upgrade your firmware.
2.10.0 Change Log
Below you will find a general list of what all changed in this release. Because the changelist was so long it didn’t make sense to list everything individually. So instead we have listed the notable highlights of the release.
- RaceCapture supported!
- Reduction of stack sizes to improve RAM usage
- WiFi support
- TCP socket support
- Streaming telemetry over Wifi Support
- IOCTL support for all communications channels
- Added support for Bluetooth baud rate to adjust to 230400. Will become default in 2.11.0
- Changed distance calculation to integration of speed over time instead of point to point measurement.
- Improved usage of newlib libc to reduce code duplication internally.
- Upgraded SD card driver and FATFS subsystem. Result is a very stable SD card system.
- Created new AT subsystem for use with all AT modems (ESP8266, U-Blox). Used with ESP8266 currently.
- Audited and fixed all IRQ values to be lower than those of FreeRTOS to ensure no interrupt conflicts.
- Added debug builds for all dev builds with ASSERT support to help find hidden bugs early.
- Moved all UART communication to DMA, reducing interrupt rates as much as 32x.
- Improved testing on API calls to help avoid future regressions.
- Boot loader fixes to work around small bugs in USB.
- LUA now supports scripts without the `onTick` method as one time only
- Make builds binary identical across platform to help with debugging.
- Add `setActiveTrack` API to allow app to override active track to improve user experience.
- Adjusted timer to support measuring of slow rotation rates (down to 1/10 Hz)
- Added auto-logger support, a new subsystem that start/stops file logging based on speed and time parameters
- Added basic metric support to GPS page for European customers.
- Added Serial Logging support to be able to debug any serial port during run time.
- Added capabilites flags to firmware. Useful for determining what the firmware supports.