Release Notes for Standard Modem Firmware Product of: Teledyne Benthos 49 Edgerton Dr North Falmouth, MA 02556 Applies to: 4th Generation Modem History: Revision 6.9.5 Created 05/04/2010 _______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Added support for remotely-specifying compact modem idle timeouts that override the hardcoded default of 3 minutes. When the compact modem is awakened by a remote unit (i.e. UDB), it will obey the new idle timeout sent in the acoustic message before idling back to low power state. 2. Modified ATW command to allow specification of idle timeout to remote compact modem/release with ATWn,m format, where n is the address and m is the idle timeout in minutes (ranging from 1 to 90). 3. Support for group/multicast semantics on compact modem wakeups: wakeup messages sent to group or broadcast addresses (250-255) will NOT be ACKed by the receiving compact modem unit(s), to avoid acoustic packet collisions. The modem will not expect an ACK in this situation and thus will produce no timeout error when one is not forthcoming. Wakeups sent to individual node addresses (0-249) will ACK as usual, and the modem will anticipate the ACKs as usual. 4. Added command/release codes for GeoPro (Germany) acoustic release system (AT%G command). 5. Corrected minor bug with +++ escape seqeunce when exiting low power mode after being put there via the ATL command. 13. Low power mode implemented in FPM coprocessor that saves ~50 mA @ 24V when not receiving 6. S-register 9 expansion: 1 = normal power-save mode, 2 = old "always-on" mode, 3 = program (only used for upgrades) 7. Driver updates for handling different flash chips with non-uniform sector geometries. 8. Fixed ATK command to support checking release status locally (SR-100 and SM-75 release configurations) 9. Correct power management bug that occurs when going in and out of low power mode. Revision 6.9.4 Created 11/16/2009 _______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Added printout of CRC on side requesting retransmit when S2=1 and there is a CRC failure. 2. Low battery brown-out failsafe. If a reboot is detected during a transmission, reduce the value of S6 one step on the next boot up. Note that this will not reduce the value stored in flash. Also added detection of sagging battery voltage during transmit that will drop transmit power to avoid a reboot. 3. Fixed the round-trip time on ranging commands to display properly if the response time is longer than 10 seconds (will now disply more than 4 digits). 4. Prevent output of messages on UART if SREG13 is 0 for ATX/ATY commands. 5. Fix to transmit interpolation filter, improves performance at bands greater than 30khz. 6. Improved transpond tone detect functionality; AGC based upon background noise level only and will not react to individual events. Also corrects major issue of insensitivity to strong pings with significant multipath. 7. Fixed problematic transmission of "C" and "J" FSK command codes introduced in version 6.9.2. 8. Improvements in tracking algorithm, SNR calcualtion and multipath calculation. 9. Adding output of CRC on modem requesting re-transmission when positive acknowledgements are enabled via S-register 2. 10. Expanding range of allowable addresses from 0-99 to 0-249. Group IDs now reside in the range 250-254 and each group comprises 50 modem addresses. 11. Expanded packet pool to 8 packets. 12. Corrected issue with DATA OVERRUN errors when streaming data into the datalogger at high speeds. Flow control should not be necessary to write data into the logger even at 115200 baud. 13. Added support for using either original or new shorter compact modem wake cycle. 14. S-register 59 added to control artificial response delays for in-air testing. 15. Added AT-AGC[n] command for altering AGC clip thresholds on a temporary basis. This can be used to reduce receive sensitivity in environments where it might be desired. 16. Modify +++ "escape" behavior in the following ways: - Hitting +++ when in datalogger mode will NOT discard the current buffer, but will save it to flash before exiting. - When coming out of low power mode, the one second delay required before the +++ sequence is now being enforced Revision 6.9.3 Created 7/22/2009 _______________________________________________________________________________ 1. I2C bus access and robustness improvements to prevent potential corruptions of data or misbehavior upon reading in bad data. 2. Corrected garbled data transfer on non-convoluted bit-rate schemes (2400 MFSK, 10K/15K PSK) which caused constant CRC failures. 3. Improved transpond tone detect functionality; AGC based upon background noise level only and will not react to individual events. 4. Removed clip detection/compensation algorithm (no longer needed). 5. Sregister-58 now controls AGC reference value for the new transpond tone detect functionality. This value is initialized to 60 and should not need to be changed. 6. Burn wire current monitoring feature added along with ATEI command. 7. Corrected bug in tracking algorithm that could cause CRC errors when receiving very long (time duration) packets. Revision 6.9.2 Created 5/28/2009 _______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Correcting bug with datalogger AT$BB command transmitting more than 4K of data at a time 2. Adding AT$BS command to allow 256-byte sub-blocks of logged data to be requested from a remote modem 3. S-register 57 controls the number of 256-byte sub-blocks. 4. Improvements in receipt of transponder pings and transmission of FSK release codes: better receive performance across the spectrum with asymmetrically shaped noise, and more reliable code transmission to remote FSK devices. 5. Added clip detection/compensation in transpond mode to give more accurate timing on high SNR pings that drive the modem into clipping before the AGC can adjust. 6. S-register 58 controls the clip detection/compensation threshold 7. Fix for RS-422 low power mode power consumption Revision 6.9 Created 2/13/2009 _______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Support for new DSP board/PLD revisions that yield better power consumption in sleep mode 2. Ranging and ping detection time improvements 3. Adding 30 minute timeout on burn wire release burn cycles; current shuts down after 30 minutes of burning and unit is allowed to go into low power mode. Burn cycle can be restarted acoustically if environment causes unusually long burn times 4. Temp_limits diagnostic command added and improved error handling on overtemp monitoring 5. Correcting bug preventing configuration of release codes higher than 32767 6. Adding check for next gen bootloader flag to indicate presence of FFS, disabling flash writes if found Revision 6.8 Created 10/31/2008 _______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Eliminated artifacts in transmit waveform. 2. AGC improvements for all platforms, including support of new hardware for UDB with different gain stage sizes. 3. Added security keys for export-controlled features. 4. Added AGC history and acoustic retrieval via at$g command. 5. Corrected RS-422 functionality. Revision 6.7 Created 6/25/2008 _______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Restricted Data Logger to range of 3G modem. Now at 704 kB. 2. Display Battery Voltage as Xmit Bat on atv command. 3. Prevent shutdown of Rs-422 if modem goes into Low Power Mode. 4. Reduce power consumption while in Low Power Mode. Revision 6.6 Created 2/22/2008 _______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Improved receive sensitivity through better AGC control 2. Fixed at%u for handling URI release codes. 3. Fixed reboot on displaying data logger contents. 4. Silent Ping feature now actually silent. 5. Return RTC Coin voltage on AT$V command. 6. Transpond mode receiver fixed. Revision 6.5 Created 1/9/2008 ( Initial Release ) _______________________________________________________________________________