v0.17.1 (Live Reconfiguration & Quieter Logs)
View this release on GitHub → Release Date: August 07, 2026
A live-reconfiguration and log-noise release. Changing frame rate, field of view, or scan mode on a streaming sensor now hands off cleanly instead of producing a burst of warnings and malformed frames, routine sensor behavior no longer logs as if it were a fault, a hung MCU is no longer reported as healthy, and two more Carbon sensors gain default background-noise calibration.
Interface contract:
carbon-interfacev1.5.6 — unchanged from v0.17.0. Firmware compatibility: install FPGA v1.5.6 / MCU v4.1.0 with the v7.1.X bringup script / updater. This release also runs on the MCU v4.0.0 – v4.0.3 firmware v0.17.0 shipped against (v7.0.X updater), so an un-updated sensor is not blocked — but the excessive log output this release quiets came from the API and the sensor both, and v4.1.0 carries the sensor’s half of the fix. Not compatible with FPGA v1.3.3 / MCU v2.6.0 or older.
New Supported Units
- Background noise calibration: default masks added for
CAR-30-018andCAR-30-019. Required to bring up these sensors through the compiled binaries (visualizer, CLI, Python/C++ bindings).
Behavior Changes
- The point stream now recovers cleanly across a live reconfiguration. Changing frame rate, field of view, or scan mode changes how many ramps make up a frame. The pipeline previously kept pairing against the old frame length, which produced a burst of invalid-ramp-count warnings and malformed frames until it happened to resync. It now closes the in-flight frame at the change, discards ramps until the stream matches the sensor’s newly reported frame length, and resumes — reported once at info level instead of once per ramp at warning level. If the stream never conforms, it warns once and continues without ramp accounting rather than warning forever.
- A hung or unbooted MCU is now reported as degraded. MCU liveness is judged from the MCU’s own counter alone. Previously a frozen counter was treated as “no signal” and the MCU was reported alive as long as heartbeat packets kept arriving — but those are driven by the FPGA’s watchdog, so a dead MCU was indistinguishable from a healthy one. The Voyant Visualizer’s heart now turns amber in that case.
- The Voyant Visualizer’s Static Line Mode toggle is always available. It was hidden unless the sensor reported a firmware version new enough to support it; every supported firmware is past that point, so the check is gone.
- Duplicate-ramp reporting no longer counts benign repeats. Ramp counts repeated by the sensor’s fallback liveness heartbeat are tallied separately and logged at debug level, so the duplicate-ramp warning and counter now reflect only real stream anomalies. Drop reports gained that count alongside a count of ramps discarded during reconfiguration.
Bug Fixes
- Corrected the checksum on control packets sent to the sensor. The host stamped them with the wrong CRC variant (CRC-16/ARC rather than the CRC-16/XMODEM the sensor computes). The sensor never rejected a message over it, but its checksum-error telemetry flagged every packet the host sent, masking genuine link problems. Verified against captured hardware traffic.
Documentation
For comprehensive documentation, examples, and installation instructions, visit our documentation site.
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