May 6, 2022  The Bridge v1.41 update

Performance increase, documentation update, soft reset with use case, important bug fix.

New reset() functiuon

We are glad to inform you that we have released the updated User Manual and an Application Note about user program encryption. Now the firmware and the Manual are synchronized and we have a robust base to move forward. At the same time, we implemented most of users' wishes into the Bridge so that it very effectively utilizes its hardware capabilities. So right now, we have empty to-do list for this excellent product (of course, every time we write about it, we find new use cases and receive new input, and hopefully this time will be no exception).

The Bridge performance is seriously increased for high load environments; where the Bridge needs to process or send many CAN frames. The performance of the user code execution remains the same, but the time of user program call was optimized and the greatest improvements (2-3 times) was achieved for the applications where all CAN frames on the bus are processed with message handlers with minimum code.

The only new function in this version is reset(); it allows rebooting the device by timer or from a message handler. The user code in the Bridge can't hang, even though it has while() statement which could cause a "dead loop". The Bridge interrupts the execution of handler after 3 seconds; however, there is no possibility to find out from the code that some handler was interrupted without using software tricks.

For example, you can add "X=X+1" at the beginning of a message handler and "X=X-1" at the end of the message handler. And in a heartbeat() handler you can call reset() if the X is 2 or greater, because the message handler execution was terminated and some variables may remain in an undefined state.

We also fixed a serious bug in Version 1.40, and we strongly recommend that all users update. The 1.41 version was released in March and was tested by selected users in high load environments for more than six weeks without any issues.

The firmware 1.41 for NMEA 2000 Bridge, new User Manual and Application Note are available on Downloads page.

 

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