"What do we want to see next from Konekt?” is a difficult question to answer at the moment. As Dash Kickstarter supporters and enthusiastic IOT developers (with admittedly limited experience), we share your vision of countless applications for the Dash and Konekt services and the streamlined development they provide. Unfortunately our development efforts are at a stand-still due to a couple of significant Dash related issues well documented on the community forum as well as directly with Konekt support. (Topic: Dash Modem Times Out and Wont Send Data After 1 Hour - March 6) In addition to the original time-out issue, this thread includes an issue identified with the battery maintaining a charge after one full charge. We appreciate the solicitation of future improvements, but getting the basic functionality of the Dash working first should be the top priority. We have received responses from the support team, but we still do not know for sure if this can be solved with a firmware update or new hardware and how long it may take to resolve. In the meantime, we will continue to dream up new applications for the Dash and Konekt services.
Hey guys - thanks a ton for the feedback here. It is definitely our #1 priority to fix those outstanding issues with both the hardware and firmware design.
We have been in the process of working through all the bugs for a new run of boards that will be available at Maker Faire in SF (May 22nd). We might not have all bugs resolved but we believe there is a high probability we will have 80% of the issues resolved by then (including the battery issues).
We really appreciate your continued support and feedback here. We couldn’t do this without you guys!
So, now the question is - assuming we get all these issues sorted - what’s on your wishlist for features
Hi Ben
Thanks for the update. We appreciate the support the entire Konekt team has provided. A couple of questions based on your need to make hardware design changes to fix outstanding issues:
What’s the plan for replacing the 4 boards we currently have?
Will the redesigned boards be available to Kickstarter supporters as a priority over boards for Maker Faire ?
We intended on ordering additional boards and sims, but will have to put that on hold until the new design is available.
Now for our wish list!
Option to utilize non-rechargeable or NiMH rechargeable batteries. Looking for a more robust option for short term backup power. We see rechargeable lithium as a bit risky at the moment for deploying commercial products.
Cellular connection status LED. Useful for development/end user diagnostics.
Hi guys - great questions all around and thanks a ton for the feedback.
For any users (such as you guys) with boards that have the battery circuit flaw we will be happy to replace them as soon as possible. You guys are the reason we could make the Dash in the first place, and our first priority is to do right by you.
As we make the transition from a Kickstarter project to a more robust hardware company we’ll always be happy to help our original backers along
Moving forward we expect to have enough boards in stock to ship to volume immediately. We will send an email to our early backers so you have priority over Maker Faire folks, but we expect to have enough boards in stock to handle the orders.
Looking forward to getting v2 in your hands on in your products!
Thanks very much, Ben. This is welcome news – and I’m very much looking forward to testing the new boards. Best wishes for success to the Konekt Team at Maker Faire.
I would like the Routing Rules to allow more control over the HTTP POST made to the webhook. I would argue that most REST based API’s that accept JSON expect to see just the JSON in the body of the HTTP POST without parameters. Additionally, many REST API’s require specific headers to be present. If you were to model the webhook with a UI similar to what www.hurl.it has, it would broaden the reach of what we can call with routing rules. You could allow us to define headers by name, and put tokens like ‘SIMPLESTRING’ into the values.
Additionally, you could allow us to tokenize the webhook uri itself: www.someapi.com/{SIMPLESTRING}/. The ultimate would be a case in where you accept JSON, and let us specify a JSON xpath to be used as a token. We send you { “sensor01”: [{ “temp”: “85”, “humidity”: “40”}]}, and you could let us use xpath to tokenize a url, header, post body with something like “www.someapi.com/somekey/{/sensor01/temp}”
I think you guys should also consider adding integrations to popular IOT services like AWS IoT, ThingSpeak, Azure IoT Suite, etc. You would then expose these as configuration options under Routing Rules.
Hey, Soggy. Just a friendly FYI – Thingspeak is working well with Dash – it was an issue that a few of us were all over a few months ago. While a more formal routing rule / preset / etc. is something that Reuben and Co. are looking at, it works pretty well as-is (Search Tool should get you there…)
I would like to see a simple token store implemented. For example, you have a sketch running on a Dash, that does it’s thing and snoozes for 10 minutes. It would be nice to do something like SerialCloud.readToken(“tokenName”). This way if I needed to change a setting in my sketch, I could do something like this:
int snoozeMS = SerialClould.readToken("snoozeTime");
Dash.snooze(snoozeMS);
The Konekt Dashboard could let you assign arbitrary tokens for each device.
Hi Ben,
Maker Faire is right around the corner so was hoping you could provide the status of the updated Dash and what outstanding issues have been resolved. Would also be interested in when we could expect to receive replacement boards. Thanks!
Tony
Thanks ! Can you provide additional details on the hardware changes and issues that were addressed on the version of the Dash that will ship in June? Also, I think this would be a good place to keep everyone informed on any future hardware changes. Is there anything you can share at this time?
I would really like to see the response from a web hook get automatically sent back to the Dash.
User values that can be added/changed in the device dashboard. When Dash connects it either polls for those items or they are automatically downloaded. (Basically what @SoggyB said.)
TCP socket interface to the outside world.
As has already been mentioned. Direct Azure support thru web hooks.
MQTT support preferable directly from device, otherwise thru web hooks.
MQTT or at least API for bi-directional data.
SMS API
AnalogRead working for A7 and above
API to reboot dash manually (eg: detect modem disconnected, manually reboot everything just in case)
Low level control of modem (AT commands to ublox)
