Brewblox release 2022/01/21

Bob_Steers · January 21, 2022, 7:05pm

Relevant links:

User guides: https://www.brewblox.com/
Discord server: Brewblox
Previous release notes: Brewblox release notes | Brewblox
Project board: BrewBlox · GitHub
Code repositories: BrewBlox · GitHub

Brewblox release 2022/01/21

firmware release date: 2022-01-21

The Spark 2 and 3 have suffered from intermittent hangups for some months now.
This problem turned out to be a combination of issues: the Spark deals badly with Wifi network changes, and these errors were not handled correctly, causing the Spark to freeze instead of reboot.

We’re still working on getting the underlying issue resolved for all scenarios, but we tracked the hangups to a bug in the system layer. Particle has now released a fixed version of the system layer, so with this release we’re hopefully rid of the hangups.

Changes:

(improve) Graph fields now automatically use the default label when added.
(improve) The Tilt service now becomes immediately visible in the UI, and not on first device update.
(improve) The PID widget boil mode setting is now a single value, and not an offset from 100*C.
(improve) The PID widget now shows a quantity editor for minimum boil mode output if the target is a Setpoint Driver.
(improve) Added Avahi and Docker daemon logs to brewblox-ctl log output.
(docs) Added primer for analyzing brewblox-ctl log output.
(docs) Added a separate section for service guides in user docs.
(docs) Added Tilt and Plaato service guides.
(dev) Updated brewblox-service to now make use of Pydantic for endpoint documentation.
(fix) The Spark 2 and 3 should again reboot instead of freeze on hardfault.
(fix) Tilt page is now scrollable.
(fix) The Quick Actions diff is no longer erronously saved to the datastore.
(fix) The UrlDisplay Builder part now functions correctly for relative paths.
(fix) The installation of brewblox-ctl no longer sometimes fails because the Rust compiler is not available.

Elco · January 21, 2022, 7:17pm

Your wording is very kind to Particle, so I would like to rephrase it a bit to clarify.

Particle has a closed source WiFi stack, which is buggy. It is closed source, so we depend on them to fix the WiFi bugs. One of these bugs causes a hardfault, an unrecoverable error. The correct behavior on a hardfault is to flash the LED red and then reboot.
But Particle also broke the hardfault handler half a year ago, so the system froze instead on hardfault, because they didn’t test their changes.

I sent them the fix 2 months ago:

github.com/particle-iot/device-os

Fix hardfault handler to SOS again

particle-iot:develop ← BrewBlox:fix/hardfault-handler

opened 07:08PM - 04 Dec 21 UTC

elcojacobs

+6 -3

This fixes the broken hardfault handler as reported in #2380 I added the `.a…lign 4` line, which I think might be the actual fix for the compiler warning that the commit that introduced the bug intended to address. It is very easy to test the hard fault handler, so it seems that the compiler warning was 'fixed' in the commit below without any testing! :fearful: https://github.com/particle-iot/device-os/commit/7b6e2086af907668d395c63404ecc754ee36fe41 I think that you are actually causing a hardfault in the hardfault handler now, resulting in an endless loop! @avtolstoy @sergeuz ## Test app: ```cpp void setup() { int (*bad_instruction)(void) = nullptr; bad_instruction(); } void loop() { HAL_Delay_Milliseconds(1); } ```

They promised to release it quickly, but did not deliver.

Now it is finally here. Sorry it took so long. I have tried to push Particle as as hard as I could.

r_vandenbroek · January 22, 2022, 2:52pm

Thanks for the insight, that should never have happened…

system · February 1, 2022, 2:53pm

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