W0CHP.net

Over the past week or so, I’ve been busy making many changes and improvements to my W0CHP-PiStar-Dash software…

New Versioning Scheme

W0CHP-PiStar-Dash has a new version display scheme…

Users are likely accustomed to the version being displayed something like this:

Pi-Star: 4.1.6 / Dashboard: W0CHP-20211226_01 / Branch: master

This versioning scheme required me to change the version number in the config file, albeit, it was an automatic process. However, the former “DATE_INCREMENT” scheme tells us nothing.

Instead, I am using the last git commit hash now. As a result, the header displays information such as:

W0CHP-PiStar-Dash_Ver.#c1d564043e

(emphasis added)

Note the Ver.#c1d564043e. This unique version number / git commit hash can display the exact changes and the date/time of changes, simply by viewing the git commit history for that specific commit hash – or by performing a git log command (or the like) in the respective local repos or folders.

Other Recent Updates & Changes of Note

• The manual and automated updating process have been much improved; and now it will force saving changes to certain user-configured config files.

• Small and unobtrusive “Update Available” link displayed in the header when the dashboard requires an update.

• Added 24 / 12 Hour time display config setting for the entire dashboard.

• Myriad performance enhancements to how the dashboard parses and displays last heard logs.

• The CSS editor now allows users to specify the font pixel size for the most pertinent dashboard information (defaults to 18px).

• The CSS editor now allows users to specify the hyperlink color (defaults to the fugly ca. 1996 “NutScrape” Navigator blue)

• Increased the configurable maximum allowed last-heard rows to 100 (was 50)

• Myriad NameLookup-API experimental branch enhancements; now displays the full “First-name Last-name”. Note that the two NameLookup branches require Pi 4’s!

• More changes/enhancements I can’t quite recall. 😛