If you take a look back through the NLD blog, occasionally we drop some hints on our next project or addition for the app. These usually are driven by what the goals that the community as a whole is driving towards. The thing about any drive is that along the way your route can change…
Recent NoLimitDronez development work has really focused on stability of the app and trying to get rid of those pesky COM port errors, so lets talk about those, and what’s now changed.
Confounding COM Ports…
The vast majority of NLD users use the app without any issues, but for a small section of our users, they continue to experience an persistent error where NLD cannot use the COM port it needs to talk to your drone. The exact reason behind this can vary from simple driver problems to unhandled issues in the way certain Windows OS versions deal with COM ports.
Due to the way NLD still uses Assistant 2 part of this process was invisible to us and so we would apply a fix, be disappointed, and then apply another fix as that one didn’t quote work as we intended. Its like trying to fix a car engine from behind a curtain. Wearing boxing gloves…
Change of Direction
If you refer back to the blog, the next cool feature we had been working on in the post on Feb 1st was supporting Mixed Firmware, this would let you run the AC flight controller on lower firmware (so you can still exploit it), but run other modules on higher firmware versions to allow for the new features DJI has developed, however for now that and all other “in progress” designs are on hold as we have to change course.
Recently as you all know, DJI removed the server that handles firmware queries from Assistant 2 1.1.2, NLD needs this specific version as the commands that run in the background to physically talk to the drone and perform the mods are sent unencrypted, on 1.2.0 we can’t read these as they added encryption, likely as a direct result of NLD and the community as a whole having exploited this method to modify the drone. We spent weeks building our own database to bypass this issue and its still an ongoing task! But that got us thinking. If DJI decided somehow to pull ALL functionality from that app, NLD customers would be stuck as our app needs Assistant 2….
So, were going to remove it. Totally. We are currently working on rebuilding NLD to talk in pure DUML to the drone. This will mean that everything NLD currently does, it will do without having Assistant 2 open, or even installed! It will mean the end of having to rely on an older version of a piece of software that we don’t control! And FINALLY it will mean the end of COM port errors across all support OS’s as we can now have control of them natively within the app. Plus, there’s a heck of a lot more secret sauce that this will allow us to accomplish, but in time we will reveal those additional features.
For now, were working on getting this thing re-wrote and working the way it always should have done. We have a working app that’s being tested in-house, but its needs some fine tuning and some fancy graphics before we can release it but even that will hopefully be very soon
Keep your eyes on the blog for some very exciting new developments and maybe a teaser or two in the coming days and weeks.
/cs2000