Firmware version 1.2.0 released

Today I have posted up firmware 1.2.0 for the Alternator regulators.  This release includes many small adjustments / tuning as a result of feedback – thank you to all!  Mostly these changes are around the fall-back operational mode when a current shunt is not present (or has failed in some way), but there are two changes which may impact people:

The definition of the Battery Size DIP switches has been changed from a 500Ah per increment to 250Ah per step.  This is more in line with expected battery capacities.  Larger banks are still supported via the ASCII configuration commands and the internal representation of battery size is unchanged; only how the DIP switches are interpreted has been modified.

The ability to change the default 60 seconds warm-up delay has been added to SCV and SCA  ASCII status and commands.  See the revised Reference Guide for details.   One side effect of this change is that the internal storage space has to be changed, and as such any existing configuration information will be overwritten and lost.  If you do upgrade your regulator and have used ASCII commands to do detailed configurations you will need to reissue those.

Going forward I have added blank spaces to the internal storage arrays, so hopefully in the future as features are added a restructuring will not be needed.

The default CPE has been modified slightly to a bit more conservative values, specificity around the target voltage for CPE #8 (Li technologies) as well as max charging temperature for all batteries.   As we learn more about how specifically LiFeP04 technology is best deployed in house usages you can expect the default CPEs to be further refined.  Of course there is always to option to override the defaults via ASCII commands.

Finally the ability for the FEATURE-IN port to do a master-reset of the regulator has an additional condition which must be met:  The DIP switches must be set to select CPE#6 (reserved) with all other switches set = ON.  This is to reduce to possibility of accidental clearing of regulator, while still allowing for field master clear w/o needing to recompile the source code.

For a more complete list of changes, refer to the commit logs in  Github:  https://github.com/AlternatorRegulator/alt-Source


Those wishing to do a simple flash upgrade of their Gen 3 regulator may use the update tool located here:  https://github.com/AlternatorRegulator/alt-Binary

And revised documentation may be found here:  https://github.com/AlternatorRegulator/alt-Documentation


Those looking at the code will notice many other formatting and naming changes:  There are mods associated with allowing common source code to be used with the DC Generator, and you can expect more changes along these lines down the road.