ANT and the new year

[Curtis Malainey]

Hello ANT users,

I apologize for the low commit traffic on the repositories the past year and a half (I will explain later.) I just wanted to reach out to you and get some feedback as well as share some highlights from the past year around the library. 

So I just wanted to clarify, the library is still maintained, I just have been extremely busy the past year and half. 

• Started 3 jobs (internships/full time, etc)
• Moved 5 times
• Did my capstone project
• Finished my degree
• Managed 2 hackathons (HackED 2018 and HackED Beta 2017)

There was also a large gap where I did not have my hardware or any development machine. That is all done now, I am settled at a permanent job and I'm done moving with a new workbench setup and new desktop. That being said, I have a project I want to do before I return to ANT (trying to learn rust and it definitely has a learning curve, but it doesn't seem to be as steep as vim.) It shouldn't take too long.

As for the future of ANT and ANT+ the past year and half have brought some cool stuff.

• antplus-arduino was launched
• ant-arduino got some much needed upgrades (testing, callbacks) and hit 1.0
• Through talks with Dynastream, they have now released the D52 footprints on Kicad (v5.1.0 should have them incorporated into the library)

So what does the future hold? I have a few main targets I want to reach in the next major release but I want your guys feedback as to what features you want. Below is a list of what I am thinking of doing (in order of priority.) If you want anything added or want anything on the list sooner please comment and I will adjust my plans accordingly for my users.

• Proper dynamic channel management in antplus arduino (e.g.e the ability to add and remove profiles at runtime)
• Use the new published D52 footprints to make breakout boards for ANT radios and publish the cad files so anyone can order/build the boards, design intended so far are:
• Adafruit FeatherWing style boards (maybe we can get adafruit to pick these up and ship them for me) 2 Designs:
• Minimal GPIO usage board for average users
• Full gpio breakout for power users (might interfere with other FeatherWing components connected depending on what pins are connected)
• Breadboard breakout (straight GPIO breakout, no voltage regulation,etc)
• Complete the message protocol and test for ant-arduino (such as burst messaging)
• Add another profile to antplus-arduino (willing to take requests here)
• Setup a mechanism for multi-channel profiles in antplus arduino (e.g. master channel bike power meter)
• Port the library over to proper RTOS such as mbed or Zephyr
• Add support for ANT-FS

Lastly I wanted to say thank you all who send me emails about the projects they are doing, I am so impressed by the creativity of the community and what you are all doing. I really hope we can continue to expand this area of the hackerspace.

Until next time,

Curtis

[rlib...@googlemail.com]

Thanks for creating the library and Looking forward to Ant-Fs support :)

I'm currently using Matlab gui to interface with varius ANT sensors via arduino.