You may have noticed that the Fluksometer v2 and its matching current clamps have been removed from the web shop. Does this mean we will not be selling Fluksometers anymore? Not at all. For the past nine months, we've been diligently working on the development of a worthy successor to the FLM02. The device will be called the Fluksometer v3. No surprises there. The FLM03 has entered pre-production as of late last month. We're expecting this first batch by the end of March. In the mean time there's still a sizable amount of code that has to be written, primarily for the new Cortex M4F microcontroller.
Fluksometer v3E
As for the Fluksokube, a.k.a. FLK01, it's definitely past the 'paperware' status as can be seen in the picture below. Half a dozen Kubes were deployed at Flukso HQ in August 2015. All of them are still reporting temp, humidity, pressure, light intensity, vibration and battery readings on their first Lithium battery.
Kubefest
Both the FLM03 and FLK01 will require decent documentation. The Fluksometer v2 had a manual written in Latex. Latex is a great tool for typesetting, but not very well suited for documenting a continuously evolving product. There's a ton of information on the Fluksometer v2 buried in the forums that never found its way back into the manual. I think we might significantly improve in this aspect by using a publishing tool like Gitbook which allows for collaborative editing with Git(hub) as a backend. Does anyone have any experience with Gitbook? If you have other suggestions, feel free to comment.
Comments
Great to see the development Bart, it's very exciting. Can you let us know the new features of the FLM03 please?
Changing the base to (what seems to be) a Dragino v2 looks promising; also innovating the sensor board seems appropriate. What I wonder is whether this results in the deprecation of the v2 FLM, thus also no new (software) features on this (for example, Jeenode integration into sensor publication)?
This also leads to the Gitbook question - well, Github already is a collaboration platform on which co-innovation would be possible - as an own repo, for example; also Github already provides a wiki section that IMHO would suffice the documentation needs, especially as markdown is easy, efficient, and also offering HTML features, if necessary (there is also GitHub Pages as another alternative). So, why not open a repository for exactly that?
As a starter I could use some spare time (not laughing too loud on this) to take some of the forum information into such (more efficient even when there would be a way to download all existing forum threads en bloc to scan, concentrate, restructure)...
Icarus75, it is on you to decide first on how you want to manage this kind of collaboration, as until now even "pull requests" or "issues" don't really lead to what you ask for here...
@gebhardm The software architecture of the FLM03 is quite similar to the FLM02 one, i.e. daemons connected to a central MQTT broker. So there will be quite some code re-use for the FLM03. As such, any improvements made to those parts can be easily backported into a future FLM02 release. Regarding the documentation, a gitbook can have a github repo as a backend. Furthemore you can publish a gitbook on Github Pages. I'll dig a bit deeper in the coming weeks before deciding on which way to go.
@vk2him I will describe the new Fluksometer features in a future blog post.
The FLM manual as a Github wiki :-)
https://github.com/gebhardm/flm02/wiki
Note: A github robot thinks I am not human, thus my github profile is currently unavailable until the support hopefully reacts...
FLM manual also available in the "official" github repository: https://github.com/flukso/flm02/wiki - here especially with a collection of answered questions: https://github.com/flukso/flm02/wiki#miscellaneous
What is the status of the new fluksometer? Can you give us a timeframe?
Hi @Icarus75, any idea when the FLM03 will be available ? (or any remaning FLM02b ?)
thanks !
Nicolas
I think I'm gonna vote with my feet...
Almost done. The last hurdle is to update the local configuration web interface.
ICARUS75 any expected date to re-sell the Fluksometer V2 and Fluksometer V3?
@Icarus75 do you have any expected date to re-sell the Fluksometer V2 and Fluksometer V3? I need more 4/5 Fluksometer for my project and need some feedback from you
Same here - an expected availability date would be nice!
@Icarus75 are there any updates about the new fluksometer?
The FLM03E is now in trial with customers. I want to make sure there are no hiccups during the trials before adding the FLM to the webshop. If you are in urgent need of the new Fluksometer, please contact me via mail.
@Icarus75 / Bart, Will there be a upgrade option or do we have to replace v2 with v3 hardware. How about data from 'old' v2 flukso?
For myself if I wanna go to V3 is it still possible to have smart metering and pulse measuring together with new functionalities of the v3? Or then should I use to Flukso boxes v2 and v3 next to each other?
I would like it when you can make it clear to current users what we can expect to do when the V3 really gets available via the shop?
I know we need to be patient but for new development it is always very difficult.....