LinkMeter v8 Release


 
Bryan Mayland

Bryan Mayland

TVWBB Hall of Fame
Another LinkMeter release to ruin all your BBQ with horrible showstopping bugs and unusable features. Version 8, which I've been told by Dick Van Patten is enough.

Usual download location Note that the new firmware image no longer has the "224" in it so make sure you flash the right image.

Don't forget to flash the new avr firmware too (from bundled firmware)!

What's New
* OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment release. We've moved off the RC1 and LinkMeter will be based on the Attitude Adjustment release that came out last month. This also switches from wpa_supplicant / hostapd to wpad for them both instead of individual packages, as wpad will be more supported moving forward.

* rPi bootloader update. Updating to the latest firmware bootloader improves compatibility with new Pis which may come with a Hynix memory chip. Updates to the linux kernel to support this also brings with it a few bonus features.
-- Adjustable memory split means devices with more memory can allocate more to Linux and less to that worthless GPU we do nothing with. Up to 496MB for model B devices. Performance benefit? None. ePeen benefit? Immeasurable.
-- On the fly CPU clock rate adjustment. The CPU will scale between 700MHz and 800Mhz depending on load. Editing the config file can boost this to 900Mhz, 1GHz or more. Performance benefit? Minor. The CPU has a timeslice of 338ms so you've gotta be active for at least that long before you see any boost. Most the pages load in 500ms so they'll see relatively minor decreases in load time. You can also set the CPU to "performance" mode where it stays locked at the high speed to shave a little bit more off but it generally isn't worth it. (No web UI for this, next next version)
-- CPU core temperature readings. Because that seems useful.
-- Supposed 10% speed boost from using FIQ mode on the CPU. So they say. I don't see it.
-- Improved stability of SD card access
-- New USB driver, now with 0.03% less jankiness?
-- 47,065 new lines of code, 6,574 deletions. This was a real **** to merge.

* See the CPU temperature / rPi revision / serial number / etc in System -> RaspberryPi

* Low bandwidth HeaterMeter status page. Weighing in at 1.6KB and being entirely built on the server means even the lowest end mobile browsers can handle this. http://yourip/luci/lm/light


* LED configuration. The meaning of the LEDs can now be adjusted. The HeaterMeter now blinks all the LEDs at least once on bootup rather than just one LED once. Here's the list of things I've built in, and the status of these can be inverted as well.
Code: 
  Off,
  Alarm0L,
  Alarm0H,
  Alarm1L,
  Alarm1H,
  Alarm2L,
  Alarm2H,
  Alarm3L,
  Alarm3H,
  RfReceive,
  LidOpen,
  FanOn,  // fan > 0%
  PitTempReached, // Set once the pit has achieved setpoint for the first time since powerup or lid open
  FanMax, // fan at "max speed"


* Ability to prevent the configuration restore from launching on a new system. If you F up your config now, you can't just reflash the SD card and get back to stock, because the config system will restore your F-up and F you back the F up. Add "norestore" to the cmdline.txt on the image to prevent config restore. More info is in the wiki.

* Avrupdate now runs more reliably and not only on the first boot. Any time linkmeterd can't talk to the HeaterMeter it will attempt to flash the avr firmware automatically (only once per service start though)

* Update to jquery 1.9.1 and flot 0.8 release.

* You can now save a PNG of a graph from the archive view of that graph.


And Happy Birthday to RJ!
 
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The update installed flawlessly for me. The Light webpage works perfectly on my "clever" phone, thanks a bunch for making that....
 
I'm having a couple issues with the new AVR firmware and the 4 line display. After rebooting the AVR, there are some extra characters at the right on the bottom 2 rows that appear to be remnants of the pit status line. If I navigate into the menu with the button and return, it clears them. This isn't a functional problem, just something odd with the display starting up. When I put the display in Big mode, there is also some garbling of the upper leftmost of 0,5,and 8 characters. I flashed back to the version from 5/24 and all is normal again.

And Thanks Bryan! Exactly what i wanted, how did you know? ;)


**Edit. Well, now the big number chars are ok but the display is still wonky after a power reset or AVR Reset on the config page. button right, then button left still clears it.
 
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I'll have to pop in my 4-line and take a look. I hope the extra LED interaction isn't causing errors on the LCD from the extra data being transmitted. Thanks for reporting
 
Bryan, you said that the next version is going to have sysupgrade support.. That's likely to take another full imaging to enable right? Aka, if that's not too far off I should just wait to avoid having to crack my case back open?
 
Yes sysupgrade support will require changes to the base image so you can't sysupgrade to something that will enable sysupgrade (for all practical purposes). The next release is a month or two away, I only make releases once there's enough features or important bug fixes because making a release is a bit of a pain.
 
Yeah, I figured as much. That is going to be a huge usability upgrade for me so I will tough it out. I upgraded all the packages on mine with opkg and it seems to be humming right along.

The only thing I can think of that would be cool (aside from the eventual sysupgrade) is the ability to save different "profiles", as mine does double duty as sous vide controller and smoker. I've caught myself starting a smoke with the sous vide pid/fan speed settings still setup.
 
Bryan,

I found your instructions on how to upgrade to v7 and it helps a lot, I just blindly carried out the steps and it worked. Should I use the same procedure to upgrade to v8? Could you give a brief explanation on those files (kmod, librrd, parted, rrdtool) under the packages folder. I apologize if this has been addressed elsewhere.

Thanks,
 
Upgrading to v7 was a little more complicated because there was no config-restore in 6.

To upgrade from v7 to v8, just pop your SD card out and flash the .img file to it using the Win32DiskImager. Pop it back in and wait about 2 minutes and it should be fully upgraded.

The packages are just custom packages used by linkmeter if you'd want to install them separately on a system that didn't have them. That's less of something someone would do nowdays, because the rPi image itself is already so custom, you'd have a really hard time using the stock OpenWrt rPi image.
 
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Bryan Mayland said:
Upgrading to v7 was a little more complicated because there was no config-restore in 6.

To upgrade from v7 to v8, just pop your SD card out and flash the .img file to it using the Win32DiskImager. Pop it back in and wait about 2 minutes and it should be fully upgraded.

The packages are just custom packages used by linkmeter if you'd want to install them separately on a system that didn't have them. That's less of something someone would do nowdays, because the rPi image itself is already so custom, you'd have a really hard time using the stock OpenWrt rPi image.
Click to expand...

Bryan, when I do this, do I lose my network settings or anything else that was changed in config.
Thanks, Bob
 
Bob Ivey said:
Bryan, when I do this, do I lose my network settings or anything else that was changed in config.
Click to expand...
You're not supposed to, but anything could happen! If you want to be safe you can always make a configuration backup from the web interface to restore from if things go wrong.
 
Bryan,

Same issue here with the display as I am running the same hardware (4 line display) as RJ. I reverted back with no issues. Interestingly enough, on the third line, last character on the right was an upsidedown 4. Weird.
 
Bryan, I also have seen the extra characters on the 4-line display in the area past where the data normally is, just to confirm.

Reading recent posts in this thread make me ask the question "did I upgrade properly?" I didn't find detailed upgrade instructions, if they are here somewhere please point me to them. What I did was use the Disk Imager to write the latest release .img file to the SD card, then boot the rPi from the fresh build and let it do it's thing, then did the AVR firmware update via HM interface selecting "Bundled Firmware" as the source. It seemed to work like a charm for me, but not sure if this is the best method for upgrade?
 
That's the only method to upgrade!

I don't know how the 4-line display is getting messed up. Sounds like it isn't getting cleared on startup (going into the menus calls lcd.clear()) which is something that certainly should not have changed. I do write data to it pretty early though in order to get the LEDs to light up on boot. At least it fails consistently so it should be easy to fix.
 
Lock Error
---------------------------
An error occurred when attempting to lock the volume.
Error 5: Access is denied.
---------------------------
OK

When I use Win32DiskImager to write the image, I get the above error. I can reformat the card and then it will write the image but I will then have to deal with changing the IP from default. Is there a better way or am I doing something wrong?

The SD card is not locked.
 
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Don't reformat the card. Make sure you're running Win32DiskImager as administrator? Right click, run as Administrator. Also make sure you don't have any other windows explorer windows up, as they might have the device open.
 
Before changing the firmware, all was working great. 4 lines and no artifacts or missing pixels.
When I installed the card and booted up I am only getting 2 lines not 4. When it shows the IP address it gives me
Network
192.168.

On the web interface, all looks good. I see all four temps and configuration looks right. When I manually scroll to different settings with the multi directional switch, information is missing and some pixels are missing. Again, only 2 lines insteat of 4 lines.

Any idea's?
 
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