New Alpha Release v1.20.3.b4

[peterp]

Dear Pycom community!

We have a new Alpha release available: v1.20.3.b4. This one is only in source code, so only for users that compile themselves!

The main change compared to 1.20.3.b3 is an upgrade of the IDF to version 4.2.1.

We intend to soon provide this as a beta release with binaries compiled, such that you can install it with the Firmware Installer as usual. If you test it please let us know how this firmware compares to previous versions in your tests.

You can find the source code and detailed commit log in the git branch master_idf_v4.2.1.

[Daniël van de Giessen]

Ran into two new problems with this version so far:

• Stack overflow in the socket operations thread while doing TLS. Was resolved by just increasing the stack size to 8192 in modusocket.c.
• Sending BLE notifications (by calling .value() on a characteristic) is broken, returning an OSError(-1). I can see that the L2CA_CheckIsCongest check in esp_ble_gatts_send_indicate fails, not sure why.

[Oliver Merle]

SSL behavior changed. The python MQTT client I am using works well on latest stable, but on this release, after successful connection, it throws OSError(-26624,). Reflashing stable works fine.

[Oliver Merle]

I've added a custom module to this release and added/activated uasyncio in the build config as well. Everything seems to work fine so far. My server thread is less reactive, though - may also be related to the changes in asyncio (running in main thread). I'd have to look into this.

Is there a timeline to an official release build which can be used in production?

[Oliver Merle]

Note: master_idf_v4.2.1 has some submodules / remote repos added as ssh (git@github.com: ...) instead of HTTPS which makes it uncomfortable to checkout the project, at least for those who do not use SSH on github.