We continue to focus on giving engineers greater control over their production deployments, as well as continuing to improve your experience using the Viam app.
Let’s dive into this month’s highlights.
Better ways to deploy and scale
Discovery service
Viam makes it easy to get up and running with many types of hardware - cameras, motors, and sensors of all sorts. However, until now the user did have to know a bit about their hardware in order to fill out the appropriate JSON configuration attributes for the Viam model.
With the Discovery service, module authors can implement a Discovery model that sends requests over a particular medium (WiFi network, i^2 bus, USB) to discover if there is any connected hardware that any of the module's models support. The Discover model will also return a suggested JSON configuration for the hardware.
This way, a user can simply know they have hardware of a general type (e.g., webcam, ONVIF camera), add the module for that type (e.g., 'onvif' module), and let the Discover model take care of most of the work of determining appropriate Viam setup.
Nested fragments
Managing fleets of thousands of machines requires a scalable approach. Without a structured way to handle machine configurations, updates become chaotic, version control gets messy, and keeping track of changes across machines becomes overwhelming.
That’s why we built nested fragments.
Fragments are reusable pieces of configuration that simplify fleet management. They allow teams to implement seamless updates, simplify version control, and track changes efficiently. Rather than maintaining separate configurations for each machine, teams can create a fragment once and reuse it across their fleet.
Nested fragments take this further by allowing fragments to reference other fragments, making complex machine architectures easier to manage. With this approach, teams can modularize configurations into logical building blocks while maintaining a streamlined parent structure.
Learn more about nested fragments
Authentication & white-labeled billing
We're empowering partners to maintain their brand identity throughout the entire user journey with new self-service authentication and white-labeled billing features. Organizations can now customize their authentication flows and ensure all payment touchpoints reflect their brand, creating a seamless experience for their customers. From login screens to invoices, every interaction can now align with your company's identity. Learn more about these branding capabilities in our detailed guide.
OTA updates for micro-RDK
The new release of micro-rdk (v0.4.0) includes a major feature, OTA (Over The Air) updates.
This feature should make it much easier to operate a fleet of microcontrollers or microcontrollers in hard-to-reach places.
Before, if a user wanted to update their firmware, they had to connect their microcontroller via USB cable to a machine (laptop, raspberry pi) and use a command line utility to put new firmware on the device. (Reminder, unlike a regular computer, a microcontroller must be flashed with the firmware containing all the code it can run.)
Now, a user can add an "OTA service" to their machine's Viam config. If the "version" field is modified, micro-rdk will automatically download and install the firmware at the URL.
Enhanced Viam app experience
Image annotation improvements
We've enhanced the image annotation experience with a more intuitive interface. Users can now edit bounding boxes on-image, and with greater precision by leveraging features like color coding for different objects and crosshair guidelines for accurate bounding box drawing. The updated interface is also unified to allow simultaneous viewing and editing of bounding box detection and full-image tags labels.
Quick access to machine details and CLI commands
Managing your machines just got more convenient with two new subtabs in the Connect tab: Command Line Interface and Connection Details.
- Command Line Interface provides step-by-step instructions to download and log in to the Viam CLI, along with commonly used commands pre-filled with the necessary IDs and keys—so you can start managing your machines from the command line.
- Connection Details consolidates all essential machine information in one place, including Machine ID, Part ID, Location ID, Organization ID, IP address, and more, making it easy to reference key details when configuring connections or troubleshooting.
Real-time error tracking for faster debugging
Now, when configuring a machine, you can see real-time error counts for each resource. Viam automatically checks for errors in the last 10 minutes, giving you immediate visibility into potential issues as they arise.
