Hi All,

I'm happy to share some cool updates about TinyPilot's September 2023 software release and to offer an inexpensive way to purchase a TinyPilot Voyager 2a device.

TinyPilot Pro's September 2023 Update

I've just published TinyPilot Pro 2.6.1, the September update for TinyPilot's software.

This update adds a "Dedicated Window" view, a feature many of you requested. It allows you to view your remote screen in its own browser window without any TinyPilot menus or status bars.

TinyPilot Pro 2.6.1 also improves the experience of pasting text to your remote device. I heard your feedback that the previous paste interface difficult to use, so we've reimplemented the feature to be much more intuitive.

We've also overhauled our update system, so you should see this install complete 4-5x faster than previous updates.

For full details on the September updates to TinyPilot's software, see my latest blog post:

What's New in TinyPilot's September 2023 Update

Sincerely,

Michael Lynch

Founder, TinyPilot

This is also available on the web (incl. the screenshots)

TinyPilot's June release features a revamped on-screen keyboard and faster, more robust updates.

Revamped keyboard

One of the first things you see when you use TinyPilot is the on-screen keyboard. Until today, TinyPilot has been using the same first-draft keyboard design that we introduced almost three years ago.

(Screenshot of TinyPilot's on-screen keyboard in TinyPilot Pro 2.5.4)

The on-screen keyboard worked, but it was difficult to use. It appeared below your remote display, so you had to scroll away from what you were doing to use the on-screen keyboard. To dismiss it, you had to scroll back up to the main menu and hide it in view settings.

TinyPilot's June release features a slicker keyboard with several improvements.

(Screenshot of new on-screen keyboard)

Now, the on-screen keyboard docks to the bottom of the screen, so you'll never need to scroll away from your remote display. You can minimize the on-screen keyboard from the tool itself rather than jumping to the menu to hide it.

We also redesigned the keyboard to optimize for limited vertical space, giving more screen real estate to the remote display.

An update process that's 45% faster

We work hard to make TinyPilot as fast and easy to use as possible, but TinyPilot's updates have gotten a bit sluggish.

By the end of 2022, TinyPilot updates could take up to eight minutes to complete, even with a high-speed Internet connection.

In 2023, we're investing in faster updates. In our tests, updates to the latest version of TinyPilot Pro completed in under three minutes, a 45% speedup compared with the April release.

We're not done yet. We're continuing to chip away at our update process, and we aim for another 50% performance improvement by the end of 2023.

Making updates more robust

TinyPilot uses microSD cards for persistent storage. microSDs have their advantages, but one unavoidable downside is that they're more vulnerable to filesystem corruption than alternatives like solid-state drives or hard disks.

Only a small percentage of TinyPilot users experience filesystem corruption, but as TinyPilot has grown in popularity, that small percentage has come to represent more users in absolute terms. It's a terrible experience to have your work interrupted because your filesystem has gone bad, so we're working to minimize these failures.

The risk of filesystem corruption increases the more data that we write to microSD cards. TinyPilot's June release minimizes wear on the microSD by moving temporary data from the microSD to RAM. The latest TinyPilot update saves over 200 MB of disk writes to the microSD, a 48% decrease from our April release.

Graph showing disk writes dropped from 442.7 MB (2.5.3 to 2.5.4 update) to 231.0 MB (2.5.4 to 2.6.0 update)

Full changelog

For the full list of changes in TinyPilot Pro 2.6.0, see the changelog.

Updating to the latest version

You can update to the latest version of TinyPilot by clicking System > Update in the navigation bar:

The update button is located in the navbar under System.

Sincerely,

Michael Lynch

Founder, TinyPilot

Hi All,

Last week, we published TinyPilot Pro 2.5.4. This release fixes a display bug that affected MacOS Ventura systems and adds tooling for exporting and importing TinyPilot settings.

For the full list of changes, see the release notes, below:

TinyPilot Pro 2.5.4 changelog

There are also two notable changes in this release that are worth calling out.

Changes to display settings

TinyPilot Pro 2.5.4 updates TinyPilot's EDID, which is the metadata it presents to the target system to announce what display settings TinyPilot supports. We made this change to expand the set of resolutions that TinyPilot can handle and to fix a bug that affected MacOS Ventura systems, but the change also affects what display settings target systems have stored about TinyPilot.

Your target system will forget any display settings associated with TinyPilot. For example, if you manually configured your target system to mirror its display to TinyPilot instead of extending the desktop, or if you adjusted TinyPilot's display resolution from the target system, those settings will reset when you apply this update.

Updating the base OS

TinyPilot Pro 2.5.4 is the final update available for TinyPilot systems running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Raspbian) Buster. After this update, if you have a Buster-based system, the Update screen in the TinyPilot web interface will show instructions for manually migrating to the newest OS version, Bullseye.

I realize it's inconvenient to update the base OS. We tried hard to find a solution that minimized manual work on you, but any other option for updating the base OS would have sacrificed stability or security. Instead, we focused this release on tooling to make the OS migration experience easier.

If your system is already running Raspberry Pi OS Lite Bullseye, you don't have to do anything. After you update to TinyPilot Pro 2.5.4, the update dialog will show a message saying that no further updates are available. When we publish future updates, the TinyPilot web interface will allow you to apply them normally.

If you have any questions about updating your TinyPilot system's base OS to Bullseye, please reach out for support.

Sincerely,

Michael Lynch

Founder, TinyPilot