We are proud to announce release of firmware version 1.15, for the Red Box wireless router and bandwidth optimiser. Please update as soon as possible.
The new firmware files and upgrade instructions can be found here:
Bug Fix
- We noticed that very occasionally there is a race condition in the previous firmware and sometimes the wifi will not startup correctly when the Red-Box boots. There are then potentially knock on problems starting up other subsystems if this happens... Rebooting a second time resolved everything of course. Apologies that this wasn't spotted earlier, but it seems that if you have an ethernet cable plugged into the LAN port (as we normally do on our test machines) then generally everything still started up correctly, that coupled with how rare it was meant we rarely experienced the issue. In any case this rare condition has been chased down and will not re-occur and units have been under test many dozens of times to ensure it's properly eliminated
New Features:
- We added 5Ghz wifi support! Find it in the Settings / Internal Network page. Here you can enable 5Ghz mode and get a significant speedup. However, beware that in theory this may reduce range through the walls of the boat - however, it's a theory, so we would appreciate feedback from customers who experiment?
- We turned on lots of go faster knobs on the wifi! Exactly how much things change will depend on which model of Red-Box you have. Effects will happen automatically and should give a small speedup in general.
- The "Connect to Internet" page has been increased in speed (by a factor of about 5x). This should be particularly noticeable when using the "All devices" option
- New "Copy to Clipboard" button in the Logs tab to make reporting issues simpler
- 4G gateway now offers some (very geeky) specs in the System / System Info page. This should be considered to be mostly useful in order to send back to our Support for interpretation, but it offers extensive information on signal strength, what type of network you are connected to (4G or 3G), network name and also whether there is a SIM inserted and whether it has a PIN set (amazing how often missing SIM turned out to be an issue!)
- Byte counters since reboot are now also shown in System / System Info. It's expected that we will have a fully per user byte tracking solution on a later release
- Additionally some users are STILL reporting that Vodafone 4G can fall over leaving the appearance that it's connected, but in reality the link is dead. We have made some changes to the PPP configuration which may detect this and restart the link. Can affected customers report back on success or not? (We don't have a reproducible case here)
- Wording has been tweaked in a few places in the web interface to aid understandability. Including wording when changing SIM on the 4G. Also the wording to "Disconnect" from the internet has proved more controversial than intended and we have changed it again this release... Please offer (polite) feedback. Note, multilingual web interface is not in this release, but is still high priority.
- Packet forwarding has been disabled by default and is only enabled once the firewall is started. This should remove the small window where untracked data can escape through the Red-Box during bootup.
- Many packages have been upgraded internally to increase support, including the 4G driver support.
- Firewall rules in Firewall mode 4 have been updated to allow WeChat to operate. This requires a certain amount of guesswork on how the app operates so feedback on any issues noted would be appreciated. Also feel encouraged to vote for any other apps to include in the firewall? Snapchat?
- Firewall rules have been altered to permit some weather apps to operate directly in firewall mode 3/4. This may be expanded or rolled back in the future. Feedback appreciated. In the meantime please be aware that refreshing certain weather apps in these firewall modes will allow them to update themselves. See further details here: Red-Box-Firewall
Weather App Shout-Out
With regards to the new weather apps where we added direct data download support, one app that we would like to give a shout-out to is Luck-Grib. This is a super simple to use GRIB weather app which has a unique selling point that it will generate smooth transitions between the downloaded forecasts which can make it much easier to understand what is predicted to happen in the future. It's available for IOS (iPad/iPhone) and Mac OSX. It's not free, but it's very low cost.