2.1.0 "Anthill"

This is our first release with a code-name, this time celebrating all the bugs in the project (hopefully now on the decline)

What's new

• Networking commands!

  • Simple messages for ESPTerm-to-ESPTerm messaging
  • Command to request an external server and get back the response headers and/or body
  • API endpoint that can be used for remote control from PC (/api/v1/msg, GET or POST)
  • For more info, please refer to the build-in help page, it explains it in great detail.

• Debug parser - select in terminal settings.
  this parser captures all input and instead of interpreting the sequences, shows them right on the screen.
  Green codes are low ASCII control characters, red are corrupt UTF-8 sequences.

  Here's an example when I tried to send an image file to the UART.
  

• Partial screen updates
  This is a big performance boost, the terminal should now redraw faster in most cases.
  Implementing this feature was quite challenging, and to make it happen, we had to completely re-work the message format sent through the WebSocket.

• Color pickers in the theme form

  • click inside the fg / bg text field to open a color picker.
    

• Improved ENQ response
  The Answerback message, invoked by the ASCII code 5, was implemented for a long time, but now is really powerful. There is also a cooldown timer to prevent it being called too often by accident, which would clog the output buffer with this new longer message.

  The overall format is like this:
  \eXESPTerm 2.1.0-beta3 "Anthill" #dc08512+0114846 id=027451 192.168.0.19\e\\

  • version
  • code-name
  • git hashes (front-end and back-end)
  • unique ID
  • IP address, if in Station mode

• Improved screen debug with Ctrl+F12 (and a new config option)

  • this is useful at the moment mostly for developers
  • shows the internal state and info about cells on the screen
  • the new config option in terminal settings enables seeing internal state; This is disabled by default to save websocket bandwidth.

• Upload tool custom chunking

  • you can now decide how long chunks to send, not only whole lines or max 100 chars

• Disabled pull-up on the Rx pin

  • This was causing issues with cheap Chinese USB-UART adapters when protection resistors were used.
    When the adaptor is too weak, the two resistors (pull-up and protection) form a voltage divider and the signal voltage never reaches low enough to be recognized as LOW.
  • Some testing was done and it seems to suggest there are no negative side effects of disabling the pull-up.

• Language mutations

  • we now offer a Czech and German build alongside the main English one
  • all except the Help and About pages (which are full of text) are translated
  • because this changes the embedded html pages, at the moment the language cannot be switched other than by flashing a different binary

• New download format

  • each zip package with the localized 0x00000 and 0x40000 bins also includes a readme, check-sums file, and a flash script.
  • to verify checksums, run sha256sum -c checksums.txt in the inner folder.
  • the flash script can be customized using env variables (open it for more info)

This release was tested with ESP-01, ESP-01S and ESP-12.
It's known to work best in Chrome (Chromium, Brave, Opera), Firefox and Safari.
Internet Explorer is not supported. MS Edge reportedly works to some degree, but is very slow.