The winter months have resulted in a few updates to the website and software.  First of all, the assembled ArduinoTrack Shields are now available online for purchase at www.customdigitalservices.net.  These are hand-assembled kits, built in Kansas, USA and are pre-programmed and tested.  Additionally, there are several other items now available for sale in the store, including Lipo Batteries that are pre-wired for the ArduinoTrack, a Lipo battery charger, and a dipole antenna designed for High Altitude Ballooning.

A users manual was written for the ArduinoTrack, along with some new YouTube videos to guide through the process of configuring the ArduinoTrack and updating the firmware.  Also, two new FAQ sections were started to help answer many of the basic questions that I receive from new users interested in Ballooning.  One FAQ is for general ballooning, and the other is specifically for the ArduinoTrack.

For firmware, the ArduinoTrack and ArduinoTrack_Combined code bases have now been combined into a single C file named ArduinoTrack.  There is a pre-compiler flag to select which mode is being programmed.  Merging these two code bases will allow for quicker development and testing for future releases, rather than having to make updates in two separate areas.  Other than the end-user needing to select which #define statement to use, there are no performance hits to this change.  This change rolled the ArduinoTrack firmware version over to 3.0.0.

The ArduinoTrack Configurator tool was recently updated to be more user friendly and to avoid a few bugs that have been around for quite a while.  It was also updated to Microsoft .Net 4.5 for the runtimes.

And finally, Balloon Finder was also updated to .Net 4.5, and had a couple of minor tweaks to it, mostly under the hood.  The current version is 2016.0.1 and has shown to be quite stable.

Both of these updates to the .Net 4.5 platform unfortunatly means that Windows XP users will need to find a newer machine to run their software on.  Given the fact that Microsoft hasn't been providing security updates for this operating system for a couple of years now, this move is actually long overdue.