New Span release

With the latest release we’ve got an assortment of bug fixes, improvements and fine tuning. Some are long overdue, some are quality of life improvements.

The dashboard

The first thing you might notice is a slight change in the look and feel for the dashboard. We’ve upgraded to a newer version of the UI framework but everything should work the same way as before. The web pages themselves are more in sync with the dashboard as well.

The next thing you’ll notice after a while is that the login session is kept for longer so when you go back to https://span.lab5e.com/ after logging in you won’t have to log in again if the session is still valid. Login sessions expire after a week if they aren’t refreshed. The maximum length of any session is set to four weeks so after a month you’ll have to log in again.

Another nice creature comfort we’ve added to the dashboard is saving the grid size and columns*, ie. if you select 50 rows displayed it will remember that until next time. The settings are saved in the browser’s local store so if you use multiple browsers you have to configure it for each browser.

We’ve added notifications to the dashboard. The notifications are used to inform about system maintenance, new versions, billing status for organisations and configuration issues. The most useful one might be the notification we issue when IMSI and IMEI doesn’t match on devices. If there’s a mismatch between the configured IMSI and IMEI the device will be blocked. If this happens remove either the IMSI or the IMEI from the configuration. If IMEI is set it’s the hardware (or to be precise - the modem) that identifies the device and any SIM card will do. If the IMSI is set any hardware/modem can be used to connect to the service. If you have a single device with a single SIM card you won’t stumble across this but if your desk looks anything like mine you might have several devices and SIM cards that get moved between devides.

The API

The API is unchanged but have a few new features related to billing and subscription plans.

The most notable feature in the API is the billing. We’ve let Stripe handle all of the billing for us and you can subscribe to various tiers of subscription on the organisation level, ie all resources consumed by a single organisation is counted towards the same subscription. If you manage more than one organisation you can assign differen subscription to each organisation. Open the Organisation page in the dashboard, then click on the organisation and the Billing submenu to manage the payments.

The limits on each subscription tier isn’t enforced in this release but in the coming months we will gradually implement this.

Samples and tutorials

The documentation section of the web pages are updated with samples and tutorials. Most of these have been available on our GitHub page but for obvious reasons they’ve been a bit hard to find. The samples and tutorials have been gathered in a separate section and contains tutorials from the very simplest (configure a device with zero coding) to full blown sample implementations with hardware, firmware, backend and frontend code.

We’ve got firmware samples for Arduino, FreeRTOS/ESP32 and Zephyr and backend/API client samples for C#, Java, Go, Rust, Swift, Dart and TypeScript.

All of the samples are available via the Span CLI

There’s also a search bar on the top of the page that might help finding the page you are looking for.