16th release: Lots of improvements: NTP, OT message parsing, Wifi-reconnect

Already the 16th release, and moving to the v0.9.x releases. This release is merging many small enhancements I made over the last months based on feedback from users in the Discord. Thanks to all of the discord members that joined the discussion over the last year, that help me come up with improvements to make the firmware stable and robust. This release focused on fixing OT message parsing, wifi reconnection handling, NTP source handling and it improves the Home Assistant reconfiguration on upgrade of HA Core.

All in all this release should serve as a stable release for the time to come. I moved to v0.9.0 to signal that it's a release that is worthy of your time to upgrade. It also does fix some weird / obscure webUI bugs that where reported. And the whole OT message parsing is improving still.

Release list of notes:

• New: NTP hostname now configurable, setting in webUI
• New feature: Adding time setup commands for Thermostat (SC command usage)
• Fixed: Improved OT status (incl. VH and Solar) message decoding
• Fixed: Statusbit decoding in webUI
• Improved: Better wifi auto-reconnect (ESP based)
• Improved: Wifi reconnection logic, reboot if 15 min not connected
• Changed: removed ezTime NTP library, moved to ConfigTime NTP and AceTime
• Improved: Moved a lot of string to flashmemory and lots of small stability enhancement and bufferoverflow fixes.

Any feedback, issues, suggestions, improvements, wild dreams, or compliments can be given at any time. Also I do accept Pull Request to improve this futher. Hope you enjoy this release as much as I do.

15th release: Incremental improvements

The 15th release is all about fixing and small incremental improvements. A list of small things I added or improved:

• Codebase now compatible with Wemos D1 Mini (recompile works without an issue)
• Improved wifi reconnection code, instead of rebooting when a wifi AP transiently goes down. The wifi will reconnect, without a reboot. In case you change your wifi password, or, SSID, then reboot the OTGW manually and reconfigure the wifi settings.
• Fixing "double configuration" items in the auto-discovery configuration for Home Assistant.
• Correcting Application Specific Fault and OEM diagsnostic msgid's in decoding and adding it to the WebUI

So this release fixes and improves the stability of the firmware. If you did install 0.8.5, then you should install this release, as it fixes some minor issues with the previous release.

Hope you enjoy this release, and as always if you have feedback, ideas or issue, please report them using github. Or join my discord server here: https://discord.gg/zjW3ju7vGQ

14th release: fixing command queue

This release addresses a bug in the command queue handling (issue #60).

• bugfix: Command in queue never got sent, due to wrong use of time functions.
• improvement of parsing status, only returning message from slave will be parsed from now own

Everyone that wants to send commands over MQTT or REST should use this release or better.

Thanks for the reports for finding issues, keep on reporting them when you find them.

13th release: Improving OpenTherm parsing

This release improves the OpenTherm parsing and some more minor issues.

Improvements and fixes:

• Adding missing OT msgids (Issue #5)
• Improved the Ventilation and Heating Recovering parsing
• Adding more MQTT messages due to improvements to parsing (more status bits are parsed)
• Adding PS=1 (print state) detection (WebUI stalls when PS=1 message is sent, eg. classic integrations Domoticz and HA)
• Bugfix to save the setting for eval interval setting
• Added more MQTT Home Assistant sensors (eg. status bits for Ventilation/Heating recovery, Solar Storage)
• Some breaking changes due to MQTT topic changes.

In short, a minor release, with no major feature. A lot of small bits added, improved or fixed.

12th release: Improvements and 2 contributed features

So another release with some help from @Roos-AID and @Sjorsjumaniac this time.

The main new features are:

1. Configurable Unique ID (thanks to @Roos-AID) - making it possible to influence the unique id being used. If you are using Home Assistant, then you don't need to change the unique id. But in some scenario's, like using OpenHAB and switching your NodeMCU, you end up with a lot of manual configuration work, changing the id of your otgw is the easist then.

2. GPIO pin output control based on OpenTherm status message (master slave)
   Any free GPIO pin can be used to be controlled, based on a status bit from the msgid 0. So you can respond to the "boiler" turning on (flame status). This way you can control a relay based on the status bit. This feature was created by @sjorsjuhmaniac.

Some improvements:

1. Detecting the online status of the thermostat and boiler. The OTGW device will go offline if either the boiler or thermostat is NOT connected to the OTGW, meaning there is no useful information to use.
2. MQTT Debug extensive error logging.
3. MQTT Reconnect interval timer fixed and changed wait for reconnect to 42 seconds
4. Rest API command now uses queues for sending commands

Fixed bugs:

1. msgid 32/33 type switch around

Breaking change:

1. Solar Storage and Collector now proper names (breaking change)

So hope you enjoy this release, debug information improved. Just hit 'h' for the help menu when you telnet to port 23 to debug your OTGW. In the meantime, just report issues, or come and chat on Discord.

11th release: Adding command queue for MQTT

This release is adding some new features and fixing some bugs in the firmware. So here we go:

• Adding feature: Command queue for MQTT - All commands coming thru the MQTT command topic will be queued for confirmed delivery and retry of delivery.
• Adding feature: More verbose debug options (just hit the keys 1, 2, 3 and you will find out)
• Adding feature: Checks littlefs releasehash for binary flashing files
• Adding feature: Send OTGW commands on boot
• Bugfix for: Change of hostname when changing it through the UI
• Bugfix for: Values not updating in the webUI

The main feature is the command queue, it will add robustness to the commands coming thru the MQTT command topic. Commands are added to the queue, retry for max 5 times, and only removed from queue if confirmation is received or if it being resent for 5x

Shoutout to all the guys in the discord server helping out in different ways. Let's keep the ball rolling.

10th release - v0.8.1 - adding temperature sensor (DS18B20)

This release is adding the external temperature sensor (DS18B20) feature made by @sjorsjuhmaniac

In addition to that, some bugfixes and improved OpenTherm message validation and processing have been added.

9th release - Improving Homeassistant integration (breaking change)

This release is a breaking change due to the fact its reimplementing the homeassistant integration to:

• change of naming convention of MQTT topics for otgw
• add OTGW as a device and group all exposed entities as childs
• add climate (thermostat) enity, uses temporary temperature
• override (OTGW TT command) (Home Assistant Core v2021.2.0+)

Also in this release:

• new rest api - clean json array for easy integration with telegraf (/api/v1/otgw/telegraf)
• fix to core ot message processing (asf flags en oem code related)

hotfix: UI issue with one element fixed, updated the littlefs bin after release

8th Release - Update to HA auto discovery

This is another fixing issues release:

• New: Homeassistant prefix now configurable
• Fixed: Homeassistant hardcoded topic in auto discovery, now configurable
• Fixed: NTP configurable timezone

7th release: Fixing sending commands to MQTT

Two small things this release:

1. Fixing a bug due in sending command through MQTT
2. Improving UI by only showing updated values in webui

Keep reporting issues if you find them, I will try to fix them ASAP.