<p>@malaire We are rolling out a version 1.7.1 in the next day or two, that marks the package <code>modemmanager</code> as a <em>Conflict</em>. This means it must be uninstalled before <code>openmono</code> can be installed.</p>
<p>We think this is the correct approach, because it uses the <em>dkpg</em> system to document the relationship. Also, it is left as a user choice. We want to avoid removing packages from a users system by default.</p>

Hi @malaire, you are right - I guess the last build went too through to swiftly. I have now found a bug in the package build script that caused copying of the mono directory to fail. I have fixed it now and uploaded a new build on the GitHub release site.

I have tested the new build inside a Debian jessie Docker container, and it works.

I am sorry about the repeated inconvenience. And thank you for your effort and feedback.

@malaire This was caused by a bug in the debian build system. I have uploaded a new build of the debian package: https://github.com/getopenmono/openmono_package/releases/tag/SDKv1_7

install files seems to be missing in the debian package, see below:

This is the 2017 summer release of Mono Framework. It includes major new features along with bug fixes.

In our effort to streamline the API and make embedded development on Mono easy and fast, we have introduced new C++ classes and augmented existing ones.

In this release note we shall driefly mention all new features in 1.7 and discuss the most important in-depth.

List of new features and fixes

New features

This is a major release with many new features, including:

• Icon system: A set of predefined icons with symbols like: wifi, temperature, mute, play, pause, etc.
• Scenes: A class for grouping UI elements into a scene. Then you can navigate between scenes.
• Battery level Class for getting the remaining battery power
• Analog low-pass filter and filtered inputs Classes for low-pass filtering analog inputs
• Hysteresis triggers Class that implements a Schmitt-trigger, for detecting analog values has exceeded a threshold.
• URL Encoding A new class can URL encode strings, for use with HTTP GET query parameters
• Time conversions The DateTime class now builds on top of the standard libc time APIs
• RingBuffer Added mbed's circular buffer class.
• DHT One wire protocol We added a class that implements the DHT one wire protocol interface
• Pin change interrupts Our interrupt classes now support pin change events. (Rise + Fall events)

Fixes

This release also fixes a number of bugs, these include:

• Increased the buffer size for Redpine module's receive data buffer
• PowerSaver class is more robust when event fire in dimming animation
• Alignment issues in OnOffButtonView graphics
• Buzzer API now uses CPU interrupts to end buzzing
• Major touch input fix. Y six was ignored until now. Touch work quite precise now.
• Fixed a graphics bug in incremental repaints of TextLabelview
• Touch system does no longer sample input when there is no touch responders
• Fixed bug in queue system, that caused the task queue to become unstable
• RTC wakes does not trigger I/O ports initialization
• Fixed issue that caused ScheduledTask's to wake mono each second

Deprecated methods

With the new release we are deprecating a couple of redundant methods. Mostly methods with unnecessary verbose names. If you use a deprecated method, use will get a compiler warning.

You should port your code to not use the deprecated methods, since they will be removed in future releases.

Features in-depth

Let us take a moment to examine some of the most important features and discuss why their are important.

Icons

We repeatedly found ourselves in need of having icon-decorated push buttons. Also, we again and again needed to display some status info that would be nice to convey in form of small icons.

Therefore we have introduced a monochrome icon bitmap-format, that can be stored in flash memory and displayed in a few lines of code. Further, we added a set of commonly used icons to the framework. These include icons for speaker, wifi, battery, play, pause etc.

You can create your own icons from bitmap images using our free tool img2icon

Example

To use icons are incredibly easy, since we added a IconView class to display them on the display:

#include <icons/speaker-16.h>

IconView icn(geo::Point(20,20), speaker16);
icn.show();

You can also change the coors of icons by using the setForegroundand setBackground methods on IconView.

Scenes

We found we needed at way to switch between different view in applications. Say, the Alarm Clock app on MonoKiosk needs to have 3 different scenes to show:

• Normal alarm clock time display (Main Scene)
• Set the time configuration scene (set time scene)
• Set the alarm time scene (set alarm scene)

Each scene takes up the entire display, and we needed to have an easy way to switch between these diferent scenes.

Inspired by what iOS and Andriod uses (Segues and Intents) we have created a class called SceneController. This represents a scene of contents. A scene is logical container of View-based objects. You add views to a scene. The scene now controls the show and hide methods for all added views.

This means to can *show * and hide all the views in the scene at once, by calling the equivalent methods on the scene object. Further, scene implement an interface for implementing transitions between different scenes. This is a enforced structure that makes it easy to to setup and teardown, related to scene changes.

Example

To use a scene you simply instanciate it and then add views to it.

#include <icons/speaker-16.h>

using mono:ui;
using mono::geo;

SceneController scn;

TextLabelView helloLabel(Rect(0,100,176,20), "Hi, I'm Mono!");
IconView icn(Point(50,100), speaker16);

scn.addView(helloLabel);
scn.addView(icn);

scn.show();

RTC Time integrated with C library functions

Since Release 1.4.2 we had the RTC time and date tracking enabled. However, the RTC system was integrated only with the highlevel DateTime class. Now we have hooked it into the lower level C API's provided by Std. Libc. This means you can use functions like time and localtime. These alo wotk in conjunction with DateTime.

Example

time_t now = time();
DateTime dtNow(now);
printf("Time and date: %s\r\n", dtNow.toISO8601()());

Critical bug fix

We have also fixed 2 major bugs relating to power consumption in sleep. Due to a bug in the ScheduledTask class, Mono consumed too mucg power in sleep mode. Further, the entire I/O (GPIO) system was initialized upon the RTC seconds increments, while in sleep. This introduced even a power consumption overhead.

In 1.7 we have fixed these issues, and achieved low power consumption in sleep mode, as we originally aimed for: 35 µA in sleep mode.

Download

Download SDK 1.7 for your platform

Hi @walkerm88,

I don't know why this happens. However, I have some suggestions of course.

First a little background on Mono serial port and drivers. On Windows we do not use any third-party driver - not even Cypress' driver. What we do is install a INF file that specify our USB CDC Serial port with the systems default USB CDC driver - which is provided by Microsoft.

In the Device Manager you should be able to confirm that by clicking the tab Driver, like this one:

The driver provider should be Microsoft - not cypress or anything else.

If not, you can try our dedicated driver installer package (that installs the INF file) here.

I hope inspecting the driver configuration in device manager sheds some light on the issue.

@malaire, this is great :-) ! We should put this into the framework!

May I suggest a class that lives in the namespace mono::power and that can return the remaining percentage of battery charge.

Maybe just extend the BatteryPower class I sent you some days ago. Tell me what you think.

The reverse can be done by timelocal or timegm.

I just realized the timelocal-like functions are missing from newlib-nano. And that is what we use on Mono.

EDIT: In newlib-nano (and newlib) the timelocal is called: mktime.

@malaire Cool! When ever you are ready, you are welcome to submit a pull request on GitHub 😀

I have realized that libc already contains time component conversion functions, that DateTime does not use. I was unaware of libc capabilities when I wrote the DateTime class 😖

I think it would be a good thing to replace the date / time manipulation implementations with libc's functions.

We can use localtime or gmtime for UTC time zones. These take a time_t and returns broken-down date and time components. The reverse can be done by timelocal or timegm.

We could keep DateTime as a component based, absolute time specification. Then create a class called TimeInterval or TimeSpan that is a wrapper around time_t. This will allow the following semantics in operator overloads:

//subtraction of 2 absolute times
TimeInterval = DateTime - DateTime
 
// subtraction and addition of absolute and relative times
DateTime = DateTime - TimeInterval
DateTime = DateTime + TimeInterval

// subtraction and addition of relative times
TimeInterval = TimeInterval - TimeInterval
TimeInterval = TimeInterval + TimeInterval

We could also call it TimeSpan or just Time

Great app, I just tried it :-)

I found out I used a too short delay after setting up the analog routing. I used 20 µs and you wisely changed that to 50 µs. However, my 20µs delay introduced a measurement error, that I compensated for by subtracting an error function. (The magic numbers I use to calculate the voltage from the ADC count output.)

I will supply some new coefficients next week, when I have time to make new calculations.

Background

To calculate the voltage from ADC output, without any error correction function, the formula is:

ADC_MAX * VREF / ADC_OUTPUT = mVOLTAGE

The raw Adc_max is 4096, Vref is 2048. This result will contain a linear error, that must be subtracted.