Altos1.6.2

keithp's rocket blog
Sun, 10 Jan 2016 22:03:08 -0700

AltOS 1.6.2 — TeleMega v2.0 support, bug fixes and documentation updates

Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 1.6.2.

AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of firmware for our cc1111, STM32L151, STMF042, LPC11U14 and ATtiny85 based electronics and Java-based ground station software.

This is a minor release of AltOS, including support for our new TeleMega v2.0 board, a small selection of bug fixes and a major update of the documentation

AltOS Firmware — TeleMega v2.0 added

The updated six-channel flight computer, TeleMega v2.0, has a few changes from the v1.0 design:

CC1200 radio chip instead of the CC1120. Better receive performance for packet mode, same transmit performance.

Serial external connector replaced with four PWM channels for external servos.

Companion pins rewired to match EasyMega functionality.

None of these change the basic functionality of the device, but they do change the firmware a bit so there's a new package.

AltOS Bug Fixes

We also worked around a ground station limitation in the firmware:

Slow down telemetry packets so receivers can keep up. With TeleMega v2 offering a fast CPU and faster radio chip, it was overrunning our receivers so a small gap was introduced between packets.

AltosUI and TeleGPS applications

A few minor new features are in this release

Post-flight TeleMega and EasyMega orientation computations were off by a factor of two

Downloading eeprom data from flight hardware would bail if there was an error in a data record. Now it keeps going.

Documentation

I spent a good number of hours completely reformatting and restructuring the Altus Metrum documentation.

I've changed the source format from raw docbook to asciidoc, which has made it much easier to edit and to use docbook features like links.

The css moves the table of contents out to a sidebar so you can navigate the html format easily.

There's a separate EasyMini manual now, constructed by taking sections from the larger manual.