We are considering a change to the way IO handles the retain flag on MQTT publish packets. The retain flag is used to allow the MQTT broker to retain the sent value, and will tell the server to pass it to any new subscribers as soon as they connect. We found that this feature was a little hard for people to understand at first, so we decided to force the retain flag to true for users by default. This change ensured that users always got the current state of their IO feeds as soon as they connected, without having to send a HTTP request to the REST API for the current value.

The decision to force the retention of values caused issues with some users, because they lost the option to decide which values were cached. We are planning to revert this change, and give people the option to cache the values using the retain flag.

In addition to this change, we are thinking of extending the meaning of the retain flag, and also allowing users to decide which values are logged to the database. So for example, if you wanted to push out temperature values every second to your connected devices, but only wanted to log the temperature value every minute, you could do so by only setting the retain flag to true for the values you wish to log. This should allow for greater flexibility when logging, and will result in increased speed for feeds that are focused on realtime interaction. We welcome your feedback in the IO forum.

If you would like to read more about the MQTT retain flag, please check out this article on HiveMQ’s blog.

Here are the stats for the past week:

* 29.03 million inserts of logged data in the last 7 days
* 10,969 users
* 8,675 online feeds (24,277 feeds total)

On Thursday, April 21st we will be deploying Version 2 of our API. This version is quite different from our existing API V1.

IMPORTANT: Your code or sketches will need to be updated if you are using the REST API.

From now until Thursday, you will want to update your code or sketches to change ‘/api/…’ to ‘/api/v1/’ so that you continue using v1 of the API until you are ready to upgrade to the latest version.

Here are some of the highlights (not including bug fixes):

NEW

• New permission system that will allow for sharing read and write access to your feeds, groups, & dashboards with other users.
• New AWS inspired HTTP request signing to help avoid exposing the user’s AIO key over insecure connections.
• Dashboards, blocks, & triggers will be able to be modified via the REST API.

CHANGES

• Username will be a required component of the URL.
• You will no longer be able to access feeds & groups via numeric ID. Feed key & group keys will be used as the unique identifier in API v2.
• Feeds will be able to be added to many groups, and the feed’s data will be namespaced to the group the data is pushed to. You will also be able to access all of the feed’s data by accessing the feed directly.

We’re temporarily disabling the email triggers until we can make them more robust in a near future update. In the meantime, the alternative would be to use our IFTTT channel, which can do pretty much the same thing as our internal trigger emails.

We want to build a much more robust system. As is, there are some weaknesses in our current design that can trigger emails to be sent far too often, or without a way for them to reset after the trigger threshold has been hit.

If you have any suggestions on what you’d like to have implemented with this feature, please let us know at the our IO forum.

This week we will be deploying two major changes to IO. We will be deploying v2 of the REST API, and we will be moving our MQTT services from mosca to aedes. This should allow us to squeeze even more performance out of our MQTT workers, and will also allow us to support MQTT QoS 2.

Here are the stats for the past week:

* 28.69 million inserts of logged data in the last 7 days
* 10,512 users
* 8,077 online feeds (22,695 feeds total)

Here are the stats for the past week:

* 30.21 million inserts of logged data in the last 7 days
* 10,086 users
* 7,766 online feeds (21,498 feeds total)
* ~50 inserts per second via MQTT
* ~5 inserts per second via REST API

After some load testing, it seems that our current server configuration is able to handle more traffic. Our current theory is that the inserts per second aren’t rising evenly with the increased online feed count because users are using IO for real-time interaction, and not data logging. Inserts per second only seem to rise with heavy and persistent data logging projects.

We have been testing the new Feather LoRa Radios with IO, and they seem to be a fantastic pair. We were able to send messages to IO through a LoRa gateway from 1.27 miles away in the rolling hills of central Maryland using a small wire antenna.

Pretty impressive for not having line of sight to the gateway!