Firmware swapping is faster than ever
Last week, we announced 16 new firmwares for the Legio platform, more than tripling the firmware count for our compact platform. However, behind the scenes, we’ve been working on something else, too: it’s now much, much easier, and much, much faster to swap firmwares on any platform, not just Legio!
Introducing hot swaps!
We’ve revamped all firmware files, as well as changing our firmware app and driver infrastructure, so that modules are instantly recognized by your computer when they’re plugged in – no button combo required. Just plug in a module via USB, click Connect and then Swap on the app, and the firmware will be changed – the swap itself will take much less time, too!
Due to mechanical limitations of both USB cables and our modules, there’s no great way for us to bring a USB connection to the front panel of a platform module. However, if you feel like routing a USB cable out of your system, you can keep your platform plugged in for easy swapping on the fly… even in the middle of a patch, if you want.
Of course, this change also makes it easier for more traditional swapping – pop a module out of your system, connect, and swap, in about half the time.
Get started swapping
To enable hot swapping, you’ll need to do one last firmware change using the old method: pop the module out of your system, and click Help on the firmware page for instructions. Changing to any Noise Engineering firmware will enable hot swapping. Once you’ve updated, your module will be recognized as soon as you plug it in going forward, and you can swap between firmwares to your heart’s content.
There is one caveat: this feature only works on official Noise Engineering firmware. If you swap to a third-party firmware, you’ll have to do a button combo swap when you want to change back to a NE firmware.
We've also revamped the platform pages to make it even easier to browse firmwares. Once you've enabled hot swapping, head over to the Legio, Versio, or Alia page and swap to whatever looks interesting with a single click!
A little bit of the background
This project has been something we’ve wanted to do for a while. Stephen has been working on some infrastructure changes to make it possible for quite some time now: the big hurdle was changing how the USB device showed up to a computer while the module was powered on.
Once that change had been implemented, we had to re-release every firmware. There were changes to how the resources were used on the module as well as some inevitable code drift, so we spent a couple of months regression testing 25 firmwares across three platforms to check for performance issues and bugs, as well as making sure they sounded like the original release firmwares.
Once it was done, though, it made things a whole lot easier – and it seemed like the perfect feature to roll out for the Legio firmware blowout, too.
Hey Versio owners, we’re talking to you!
Again, this process works for all Legio, Alia, and Versio modules. But Versio owners may want to pay special attention: in the process of updating all of the Versio versions, we noticed and fixed a surprisingly insidious and longstanding bug that affected how the DAC booted. If you haven’t updated your Versio firmware in a while, give it a try – it should sound even more transparent and bright now.
