Arable Mark 3 Firmware 2.1.0.9 Release Notes

Doc Number: ARA2023-00023 Rev A / Date: November 28, 2023

Release Overview

The firmware release 2.1.0.9 is a general release for improved network performance with the Arable Mark 3. 

You can reach out to Arable Customer Success at support@arable.com or via the Help icon in the Arable Mobile/Web to enable this on a per unit basis.

List of Changes

New Features

• The 2.1.0.9 has incorporated support for Telecom Personal LTE-M SIM and Subscription in Argentina. This opens up a path to transition the Arable Mark 3 fleet from older 2G network to newer LTE-M network with better coverage in the agricultural areas in Argentina.
• A network scanning feature has been added to this official release. This allows Arable personnel to go out and assess the signal strength and quality of an area and record this into log files on a computer.

Defect Fixes

• Reset-9 is the reset on Arable Mark that helps the unit to get out of a lock-up related to the modem connectivity. It was previously set to only repeat every 24 hours if the problem remained. We have now increased the repeat rate to every 12 hours to allow alternating day and night attempts. 
• There was also an issue in 2.1.0.8, where the reset-9 did not trigger even if the modem was not succeeding to connect successfully. This has now been resolved.
• Several HTTPS parsing errors in case of split packets were fixed in 2.1.0.9. This will alleviate some delayed data delivery cases that were seen in the field due to temporarily failed connection attempts with previous releases.
• The network LED will now turn green only when the Mark 3 has successfully connected to the backend instead of when attached to the network. This will help avoid users leaving the field while connectivity problems remain
• Camera image sending now also supports sending maker notes from the Mark to the cloud for providing additional metadata around the jpeg image.
• For Vision, the Mark 3 is now not overwritten images/stored images that are not sent to the backend if more than 30 images are collected but not sent. This restriction is now removed.
• While the Mark 3 Battery Percentage accuracy has been significantly improved in this release, there are still some cases while solar charging where the percentage can be higher than expected, In this case, do the reading at non-sunlight.
• For Vision, the camera auto-white balance is set to off by default. The AWB is done instead in the cloud system based on spectrometer color temperature data sent from the Mark alongside the image.
• Tbelow lw_temp3 out of range is now handled more deterministically by the Arable Mark 3 by sending a -1,000 value to the cloud system that then can discard the reading. 
• Spectrometer spike and sensor read failure for AS7341 is now handled more deterministically by the Arable Mark 3 by sending a -1,000 value to the cloud system that then can discard the reading. 
• Spectrometer spike and sensor read failure for AS7263 is now handled more deterministically by the Arable Mark 3 by sending a -1,000 value to the cloud system that then can discard the reading. 
• A zero wind error is now handled more deterministically by the Arable Mark 3 by sending a -1,000 value to the cloud system that then can discard the reading. 
• As part of internal triage and development purposes, the Arable Mark 3 can be set to record audio. The duration of audio has been increased to 5 minutes instead of 2 minutes.

Known Issues

• There can be units prior to D007113 that can show indications of a lack of sharpness in the middle of images. Contact Customer Support if you would see this problem sustained in the field.
• There have been early units where images show some darkness at the edges. This is coming from the shadowing by the camera lens holder and is nothing to be concerned about. Hardware improvements are gradually done to reduce the occurrences. 
• We have seen a handful of units that show reset 1s and this is then an indicator of a sensor error.
• Similarly a few units have shown reset 0 in association with the camera usage. Reset 0 is a watchdog reset. We are investigating the root cause and expect to resolve it with the next firmware release.
• Reset 21, which relates to the file system, has been observed randomly on a few devices. The unit is recovering automatically in this case. We expect to resolve it with the next firmware release.
• We have seen that the signal strength parameters RSRP can fluctuate when on LTE-M more than it should. We will investigate this further and target a fix for the next release.
• The calibration of the magnetometer, used for x,y, z orientation, can fluctuate up to 10 degrees on some devices. We are looking into an improved calibration step that will take into account temperature for each device to improve accuracy. 
• We have seen a few Arable Mark 3 that have had a higher currency and power consumption in idle mode than is normal. We have deduced this to the initialization step of the USB modem and expect to resolve this with the next release.
• While we have a set of filters for handling edge cases for the sonic anemometer in the Arable Mark 3 already and they are working well, there are still rare cases where wind spikes can get through. We are investigating applying an additional filter in the cloud system for this purpose.
• When turning off an Arable Mark 3 there is up to a minute of unavailability as the unit is rebooting. The unit comes back after that.