Just in time for the day 2 days before Halloween: 1.1.7 is on its way to your devices. Here's what's in it:
. Vehicle/motor stats
An earlier update started tracking flight time and distance, storing it in the application preferences. That's been fleshed out in this version, and there's a place where you can actually see it now.
On the main menu, you'll find a "Vehicles" item. Once you've connected to your copter, you'll be able to hit this item, and open a screen showing your copter in a list. Click on it, and you can give it a name and description, and see (and optionally change) the SSID it connects on.
Below that, you'll see 4 entries for motors. The idea here is that Solex will track your motors' lives along with that of your copter. You'll get a notice in this screen if one or more of your motors exceeds its recommended service life (150 hours). When you replace one, you can hit the "reset" button for that motor and reset the counter for that motor.
. Multi-vehicle support
Notice above, where I said "Vehicles" (with an s). Solex now explicitly handles multiple vehicles. When you connect to a NEW copter, you'll see an entry for it in the Vehicles screen, and Solex is better at connecting to (and tracking) multiple vehicles.
. External storage option
This one seems kind of boring, but it's actually kind of a big deal. Previous versions of Solex stored all of your cable cams, fences, etc. in a private directory visible to Solex, but it's also a directory that gets deleted when you uninstall the app. If you do that without remembering to "share" your data in an email or something to yourself, all your data gets lost. Now you can select "External storage" in the settings, and the data will be copied to a public directory on your tablet where it won't be deleted on an uninstall. Note that the first time you turn this option on, Solex will check to see if it should copy your existing data to the new location and ask you about it. If you say "OK", all your existing data will now be in the new directory.
. Fix HDR shot switching to video mode
In an effort to be polite and convenient, the HDR shot would reset your camera mode back to the mode it was in before you ran the HDR shot. The problem is, it would do this even when you weren't running the HDR shot. That's been fixed.
. "Rule of Thirds" camera grid
Someone asked about a "rule of thirds" camera grid. So now the camera grid does that instead of just drawing a bunch of lines on the screen.
. Fix picture viewer in Flight Log
Does what it says.
. HDR Shot improvements
Seems like a lot of people prefer to have more control over which EV exposures are used in an HDR shot. Previously, you could set the low and high range, and that's it. Now you can select specific EV values, and the shot remembers those settings the next time you run the shot. So that's easier now.
I didn't know this earlier, but apparently Protune has to be turned on for EV adjustments to even work. So now the HDR shot turns Protune on if you don't have it on, and turns it back off when the shot ends.
Finally, the GoPro camera seems to be *really* picky about making adjustments and taking pictures too quickly afterward. So the app is more "careful" about telling the camera to do all these things. You might still encounter situations when the camera won't change EV settings when it should. (You can check this by poking the EV Comp buttons on the flight screen. If you have Protune on and it doesn't change, you might need to go into the camera settings screen and toggle Protune a couple of times to convince the camera to play along.)
That's it for this update. I'm working on a way to track individual batteries' health and some other cool things I talked with people about this week.