Actively maintained Branch: Lots of bugfixes, huge improvements application and physics Engine

[JaapvanEkris]

New functionality:

• Added support for ANT+ rowing metrics broadcast
• Allow the user to change the GUI layout and metrics, including displaying the force curve
• Allow user to turn on or off ANT+ and BLE functionality and dynamically switch between ANT+ and BLE HR monitors from the GUI
• Added support for creating Garmin Fit-files, including reporting of distance per stroke, workout plan, intervals, splits and pauses. Files work with Garmin, Strava and intervals.icu
• tcx-files and RowsAndAll files now have support for splits, intervals and pauses as well
• Added the option for more complex workouts, as a hook for the PM5 and webinterface (these are a ToDo where the PM5 workout interface and GUI is still in development, but they can be set in server.js already)
• Added PM5 Interval-types, including splits, in the datastructure

Added some bugfixes/robustness/accuracy improvements:

• Provides a preliminary fix for Bluetooth issues where Bluetooth will not work after a reboot and crashes after a setting change (see the related issue for more info)
• Added support for the newest version of Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm), moved from Node.js v16 (EOL) to Node.js v20 (current) and upgraded packages where possible. Is known to work on Raspberry Pi 3 and 4
• Drastic improvement of the architecture to make it more robust and more extensible
• Improved the Session manager to drastically improve session limit measurement, especially with less data intensive machines
• Improved the accuracy, responsiveness and efficiency of both the Linear and Quadratic the Theil-Sen algorithms. For larger 'flankLength' machines (12+ datapoints), this improved algorithm will also result in 50% reduction in CPU use, while increasing the responsiveness and accuracy of the forcecurve and powercurve. For smaller 'flankLength' machines it will improve less, but still improve.
• All linear calculations (stroke detection, Drag calculation, recovery slope calculation) now use the Linear Theil-Sen algorithm, making this calculation more robust against outliers and stroke detection errors
• Added a configuration sanity check which logs obvious errors and (if possible) repairs settings, after several users messed up their config and got completely stuck.
• The configuration sanity check also provides an automated upgrade path for 0.8.4 users to V1Beta, as all the newly added configuration items between these two versions are automatically detected, logged and repaired.
• Added restart limits to prevent infinite boot loops of the app crashing and rebooting when there is a config error
• Fixed the GPIO tick rollover, which led to a minor hickup in data in rows over 30 minutes
• Made Flywheel.js more robust against faulty GPIO data
• Fixed an application crash in the RowingData generation when the target directory doesn't exist yet
• Improved the structure of the peripherals to allow a more robust BLE and ANT use

[JaapvanEkris]

We just released version 0.9.5

New functionality in 0.9.5

• Added FIT-File support: you can now automatically generate a FIT-file after a rowing session, which allows for a more detailed reporting than the tcx-format, and is commonly accepted by most platforms
• Introduction of the session manager, which provides support for intervals, splits, rest intervals and spontaneous pauses in the session and also adds these to the FIT, tcx and RowingData recordings. Please note, setting predetermined intervals and splits in a user friendly way (via PM5 and webinterface) is still a ToDo that is intended for 1.0.0.
• Improvement of Magnetic rower support: the new session manager makes sure that the session is nicely stopped, even when the flywheel has stopped quite abruptly before pause timeouts have time to kick in. This is the case on some magnetic rowers which have an extreme high drag, resulting in very short spin down times of their flywheel.

Bugfixes and robustness improvements in 0.9.5

• Improvement of the architecture: we cleaned up the old architecture and went to a more message bus structure where clients are responsible for listening to the datatransmissions they are interested in. See the architecture description for a deep-dive of the implementation. Key benefit is that this is more maintainable as it allows serving data more easily to totally different clients (webGUI, recorders and BLE/ANT+) with totally different needs, making future enhancements easier.
• Improvement of Bluetooth stability: we moved away from abandonware's BLE NoBle/BleNo implementation and moved to stoprocent's implementation, as that package is better maintained and works better with newer installs of BlueZ, which should fix some issues on Raspberry Pi Bookworm. Unfortunatly, none of the NoBle/BleNo descendents are immune to some specific BlueZ issues (see known issues).
• Performance improvement of the TS estimator, further reducing CPU load, which significantly improves accuracy of the measurements and metrics as the Linux kernel has an easier job keeping the time accurate.
• Removed a lot of memory leaks, although only being problematic in large simulations (i.e. over 3000K), we want to keep our code to behave nice
• Improved robustness of the stroke detection algorithm
• Validation of the engine against a PM5 for over 3000KM, where the deviation is a maximum of 0.1%

Known issues in 0.9.5

• Bluetooth Heartrate can't be switched dynamically: due to some underlying changes in the OS, BLE heartrate monitors can't be activated through the GUI without crashing the BLE metrics broadcast (see the description of issue 69). As this is an issue in the OS, and all previous versions of OpenRowingMonitor are also affected by this issue. Version 0.9.5 has a workaround implemented that mitigates this at startup. So configuring the use of a BLE heartrate monitor in the config file should work.