Week of 2016–07–17
This Happened
Interval Service — All for one and one for all! … and some for most? When you add an interval, throttle, debounce, or delay (and probably some others I forgot) to your flow, the interval service will handle the complexity of sending a timed message to the flow engine. In olden times, you know, before last week, the interval service was represented by a single device, 765bd3a4–546d-45e6-a62f-1157281083f0 (be sure to memorize that, there will be a test later).
Our scientists recently uncovered a huge cache of unused UUIDs. Now, any time a flow is deployed a new interval device is automatically created an assigned to your flow. This allows us to isolate problematic intervals and handle them without affecting other flows.
Meshblu HTTP—Bandwidth is essentially free, right? Wrong. Meshblu will now automatically apply gzip compression to all payloads containing the following HTTP header:
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
This greatly reduces the size of meshblu requests and helps reduce overall bandwidth usage. If you have a custom Meshblu HTTP client, you may now enable this feature and shrink that payload.
Protip: If you are searching for devices, one easy way to get a smaller payload is to use the Search API with projections. You’ll thank me later.
Connectors — Gateblu is so 2015. The future of connecting devices to Meshblu is here. Connectors provide an easy installation process and precompiled modules for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
This week we rolled out support for ARM on Linux. This allows connectors to run natively on the Raspberry Pi. Great! But what about installing new connectors? We’ve got you covered. Continue on, fearless reader.
Command Line Connector Installer — No GUI? No problem. Connectors can now be installed from the command line. We created a simple cross platform binary for headless connector installs. Someday we’ll even update the README to tell you how to use it.
Ded Bugs
Only one notable fix this week: we noticed some irregular responses when using channels in a flow. We uncovered a nasty bug that was responsible for occasionally making requests without the proper credentials. The bug was squished and channels should be a little more reliable now.
The Future is Near
It has been notoriously difficult to add your own devices and API integrations to Octoblu. We are building support for custom registries that allow you to add your own devices to the Octoblu All Things page. We are working on a guide to help explain the process in detail. Look for that in an upcoming issue of Octoblu Weekly.
Some other cool stuff is right around the corner, unfortunately we can’t talk about it just yet. If you are a time traveler from the future, then this is almost when it happened… but not yet.
