New Software with improved alignment of recordings

We’re pleased to announce the release of the 2.3.0 Otii application along with the 1.1.0 Otii Arc firmware. It’s a fairly small application release that improves on existing features, fixes a few bugs and improves performance. The firmware is the largest release since the very first one. Let’s start with some desktop changes.

Alignment of recordings

Making it easier to align recording is one of the most sought-after improvements from our customers. After a whole lot of refactoring in the selection code, it’s now possible by right-clicking a recording and then choosing to offset it, either right or left, by the duration of the selection. At some point this should be improved further, so several recordings can be offset at the same time in this manner.

Selection & statistics performance

While refactoring the selection code to enable the alignment, a number of usability and performance improvements were also made.

Statistics are no longer shown for hidden recordings. Why spend time computing something that probably isn’t of interest either way?

When making a selection over 1 second in duration, statistics will not be calculated until the mouse stops moving. A smooth selection can thus be made over a huge data set. If the standard delay of 500 ms without mouse movements before the calculation begins doesn’t suit you, it can be customized in the preferences.

A few other minor tweaks were also made, for example when offsetting a recording only that recording is re-calculated instead of all of them. This is not the end of improvements in this area. For the GUI to remain responsive, statistics calculations should happen in a separate thread. But right now, focus must shift to other tasks.
In addition to these two larger changes, some smaller ones are worth mentioning:

• A lot of problems related to UART baud rate are fixed.
• Graph drawing performance has been improved by not calculating hidden recordings.
• Next time firmware is upgraded, it will take about 3 seconds instead of the ages it can take on Windows today.
• Recordings left without any data after crop are now deleted.
• A button above the graph, along with fit width etc., for clearing the selection was added.
• The confirmation when deleting a recording is now shown when using the context menu as well.

For a complete list of changes in the application, please see the release notes.

Firmware

The firmware has seen many changes, some of them are already mentioned above, as it’s a joint effort between the application and the firmware. There are however a few changes in the firmware unrelated to the application.

• The current sink accuracy has been improved a lot. The offset error previously seen is now corrected. The smallest step size of the current sink is 38uA. This limited the accuracy of the results. With 1.1.0 the current alternates between the two closest steps. The resulting average current over a millisecond is within a few uA of the specified current.
• DC detection has been improved and the startup sequence adjusted. This corrects a current inrush which dropped the VBUS too low on 1.0 hardware on some computers USB ports. Some customers experienced the Arc going into a continuous relay-clicking mode when started with DC connected.
• A priority problem on one of the Arc buses was fixed. This caused repeat values when committing settings into NVM. For example if the supply voltage was changed in Project Settings in the application.