Electric Imp will shortly make impOS™ 40 — the next major version of the imp operating system — available as a beta test release. We would therefore like to invite any customer who wishes to trial impOS 40 on their development hardware to join our beta program and receive the new code ahead of its formal developer roll-out.
impOS 40 is designed to bring our support for cellular imps such as the impC001 to a par with our existing WiFi- and Ethernet-based modules. It also features a number of other improvements for all imps. It also lays the groundwork for some major new features we are currently putting in place for impOS 42.
For full details of impOS 40’s enhancements and changes, please see the Release Notes.
We recommend that all customers begin testing impOS 40 on development hardware right away. This initial test release will be followed by a full deployment to all development devices in the coming weeks. In due course, we will begin deploying impOS 40 to production devices in stages, including an initial opt-in phase. We will provide more details of the impOS 40 release timetable shortly.
If you have already been testing impOS 39 — impOS 40’s closed development and test version — with cellular, you need to be aware of a breaking change that impOS 40 introduces to the cellular information returned by the imp API method imp.net.info() — please see the API documentation for full details.
Please contact us if you would like Electric Imp to update one or more of your development devices to the impOS 40 beta release. Customers should make use of Electric Imp support facility; developers should post requests below (or sent a DM to @hugo). You will need to supply the devices’ IDs, or the name of a Device Group to which they have been, or will be, assigned.
Please provide any feedback you have, including bug reports and other issues, and any questions you may have regarding the breaking change described above, via the same channels.
We hope you enjoy putting impOS 40 through its paces as much as we have enjoyed preparing it for release.
This deployment has now started with about 25% of recently-connecting developer imps queued for upgrade to impOS 40.0. More will receive updates over the next few weeks.
We are pushing a new version of release 40 - release 40.13 (release notes) to around 10% of developer devices today.
This release addresses one customer-visible issue that was inadvertently introduced into release 40 where we increased the device’s MTU handling up to the ethernet maximum. This change caused large packets that would generally have been discarded at the network driver interface to be passed to the TCP stack. If the packets were arriving quickly enough, AND the imp had under 64kB of free memory available, this could cause the imp to run out of memory - this would appear as an SW_RESET wakereason.
The issue mainly shows up on devices connected to Google’s mesh APs, which send 10MB+ of junk UDP data to each WiFi device periodically to check link quality (which strikes me personally as rather adversarial behaviour…). Big thanks to the customer who reported this and helped us track it down by providing wireless captures of the issue, and who has been testing the fix on well over 1,000 of their devices in customer homes.
We’ll continue to monitor 40.13’s performance in the field with this new deploy and if all looks good, will deploy to all development devices then production devices in the coming month or so. Obviously, if you see anything strange, please let us know.