Today I released a new version of Typica. This is a program that I use at my coffee roasters to record what I'm doing and keep track of various sorts of records that are produced in the course of running a coffee roasting facility, but it's grown beyond an internal work project and since 2007 has been a free software project (MIT license). It's now used by many professional roasters throughout the world.
Most of the changes in this release are minor improvements so I was originally planning to hold off on a release until version 1.7 was ready, but two things happened that prompted me to put together a 1.6.3 release. First, there was a rather severe bug report from someone using a device communicating with Modbus RTU. The problem was almost certainly related to an intermittent fault in the wiring, but this was the sort of thing that I thought it would be good to be more robust against. Second, someone using the software on a Mac with hardware from National Instruments discovered that their hardware doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.10 while it previously worked on 10.9 (officially I couldn't find support for anything more recent than 10.8 and I was forwarded a message from NI's support that basically said don't hold your breath). Other hardware that was supported on Macs did not provide as high a measurement quality which limits the utility of some features and I really couldn't see not having something good to recommend to people who want to use my software on a Mac with a current version of the operating system. Thankfully, Phidgets, Inc. stepped up and sent me one of their 1048 boards which is a good replacement that works on 10.10 and is also really easy to get working on Linux so the new release has support for that hardware as well. This is a particularly interesting bit of hardware in that it's a very good choice for staying out of vendor lock in. It works on Linux (LGPL support library that builds easily, not tied to some arbitrary ancient distro)/Mac/Windows (and supposedly some of the BSDs though I haven't tested that myself) and it also works with at least a couple other applications geared toward coffee roasters with at least one of these other applications also open source so it's one less thing to change if you don't like some other part of what you have.
The 1.7 release will mainly focus on improving data acquisition hardware support while Typica 2.0 will switch from using Qt 4.x to Qt 5.x and introduce many new features.
Typica 1.6.3 Released
Today I released a new version of Typica. This is a program that I use at my coffee roasters to record what I'm doing and keep track of various sorts of records that are produced in the course of running a coffee roasting facility, but it's grown beyond an internal work project and since 2007 has been a free software project (MIT license). It's now used by many professional roasters throughout the world.
Most of the changes in this release are minor improvements so I was originally planning to hold off on a release until version 1.7 was ready, but two things happened that prompted me to put together a 1.6.3 release. First, there was a rather severe bug report from someone using a device communicating with Modbus RTU. The problem was almost certainly related to an intermittent fault in the wiring, but this was the sort of thing that I thought it would be good to be more robust against. Second, someone using the software on a Mac with hardware from National Instruments discovered that their hardware doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.10 while it previously worked on 10.9 (officially I couldn't find support for anything more recent than 10.8 and I was forwarded a message from NI's support that basically said don't hold your breath). Other hardware that was supported on Macs did not provide as high a measurement quality which limits the utility of some features and I really couldn't see not having something good to recommend to people who want to use my software on a Mac with a current version of the operating system. Thankfully, Phidgets, Inc. stepped up and sent me one of their 1048 boards which is a good replacement that works on 10.10 and is also really easy to get working on Linux so the new release has support for that hardware as well. This is a particularly interesting bit of hardware in that it's a very good choice for staying out of vendor lock in. It works on Linux (LGPL support library that builds easily, not tied to some arbitrary ancient distro)/Mac/Windows (and supposedly some of the BSDs though I haven't tested that myself) and it also works with at least a couple other applications geared toward coffee roasters with at least one of these other applications also open source so it's one less thing to change if you don't like some other part of what you have.
The 1.7 release will mainly focus on improving data acquisition hardware support while Typica 2.0 will switch from using Qt 4.x to Qt 5.x and introduce many new features.
Post Comment