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NightDriverStrip — monthly activity digest

What landed on NightDriverStrip's main branch, month by month. External-context reference — a factual log of a friend repo's releases, not projectMM's own history or roadmap. Newest month on top. The reusable prompt that generates these lives in README.md.

Summarised via the GitHub commits API (no local clone), so counts are all commits on main, not first-parent merges — the bullets filter out dependency bumps, whitespace, and pure refactors. The one release in the window, v1.3.0, was published 2026-01-10 but tagged from a late-November commit; it isn't a clean month boundary, so months are kept whole with the release noted as context.

June 2026 (up to v2.0.0)

The big one: NightDriverStrip 2.0.0 shipped on June 14 — a major release cut from main.

New - Brand-new Web UI replacing the old one, plus a new browser-based web installer for flashing devices. - Runtime-selectable output drivers: settings that used to be compile-time (like strip type) can now be changed on the device without rebuilding. - APA102 / SK9822 strips are now a first-class output type alongside WS281x and HUB75. - Multi-layered, categorized device settings structure. - New optional WiFi-activity output pin that goes HIGH while WiFi is drawing; projects can now define zero active effects and stay idle until then. - Effect-timeout reset on a remote-control effect switch is now a user setting (previous always-reset behavior stays the default). - Effects reworked (weather, stocks, subscribers, etc.) to display usefully on short 48x16 matrices. - New and revised effects, plus smarter memory handling (targeted mix of internal RAM and PSRAM).

Fixed - Render hiccup/stutter when settings auto-saved: SPIFFS/JSON writes no longer block the render thread. - Effect-manager crash shortly after load when the effect set changed. - Serpentine-matrix visualization corrected. - Lower COLORDATA server framerate optimized for smoother remote color streaming. - PSRAM-related instability during flash/cache writes reduced by keeping save-time JSON in internal RAM.

June 2026 (post-v2.0.0)

  • v2.0.1 (also June 14): patch that fixes the web installer failing to build for the 2.0.0 release (removed a stale project entry).
  • Stock-ticker effect now shows correct live data, fetched through the new V2 API.
  • Fixed 64x32 (wide-and-short) displays that were rotating and doubling their content instead of scaling — effect previews in the Web UI and CLI now match the active output driver's pixel mapping (issue #878).

Watching - Issue #877 ("networking seems broken") drew heavy discussion (38 comments) around the WebUI being unreachable after a recent merge on some setups; closed in June.

Auditability: ~40 first-parent merges/commits on main with author-date in 2026-06-01..2026-06-30 (commits?sha=main&since=…until=…); two versioned releases published June 14 — v2.0.0 (commit ce00eaa) and v2.0.1 (commit 835015b), both ancestors of main, so the month is split at v2.0.0. Issues checked via search/issues for created:2026-06-01..2026-06-30 (0 opened in range) and closed:2026-06-01..2026-06-30 (#877, #878, #825 closed; #878 and #877 user-facing).

May 2026

~75 commits on main, 2026-05-01 … 2026-05-31.

New

  • RGBWW / SK6812 white-channel support — W/WW helpers, a WarmGlow test effect, configurable SK6812 white extraction; colour-temperature naming cleanup.
  • New Setup Wizard / guided-installer WebUI — and a push to make the UI a "non-special consumer": everything the official UI needs now comes from the firmware over the wire (spec/schema), not baked into app.js.
  • M5 Stick S3 support (IR + WS2812B); optimised WS2812B draw path; ACTIVITY_PIN support; allow zero effects in the table.

Fixed / hardened

  • Major PSRAM strategy reversal — switched to PSRAM-default routing (threshold 96, Mesmerizer's proven value) and removed the bespoke psram_allocator family; JSON save-path now uses internal RAM to avoid touching PSRAM during flash/cache-disabled windows.
  • Several concurrency and memory-safety fixes across buffer / drawing / network / task paths; PolarMap and noise-generation bugs; weather-data state protection.

April 2026

~60 commits on main, 2026-04-01 … 2026-04-30.

New

  • New local WebUI with a custom LED RMT output driver, dynamic settings, and a WS2812B output driver; first beat-detection / audio-architecture modernization pass.
  • OTA: successfully cancels rollback on boot; unified hardware identity via eFuse.

Fixed

  • LED-buffer crash (#842); socket race condition + NTP init issues; nullptr deref polling MAC before the C6 companion is ready; Cube/Noise matrix-effect refactors; PSRAM cache-issue partition correctness; hexagon build.

March 2026

~32 commits on main, 2026-03-01 … 2026-03-31.

  • Replaced the RemoteDebug dependency with a custom Logger + Telnet server — plus WiFi-stability and hardware-safety improvements; fixed a DebugCLI use-after-free for active telnet sessions and a stack-corruption (FD_SETSIZE) in the telnet sink.
  • New Arduino-V3 partition layouts (standard, NOOTA, 8MB).
  • Otherwise dependency bumps and include hygiene.

February 2026

~13 commits on main, 2026-02-01 … 2026-02-28.

  • Replaced the IRremoteESP8266 library with a native RMT IR decoder (Key44 remote support, string IR-code mapping).
  • FFT implementation optimised (moved to member, weights enabled); SoundAnalyzer implementation moved to its own source file.

January 2026

~60 commits on main, 2026-01-01 … 2026-01-31. (v1.3.0 was published Jan 10.)

New

  • Fuzzy effect selection (CLI + firmware) with tab completion and brightness nudges; text-scrolling improvements.
  • Smoke effect + noise-calculation precision improvements.
  • Python client (nightdriver_client): layout mapping + auto-detection, PNG-sequence and contact-sheet output, fuzzy effect resolution.

Fixed / build

  • Worked around an ESPAsyncWebServer macro/symbol conflict (renamed STR macros, adapted pattern subscribers); replaced the UrlEncode library with a local implementation; many ENABLE_WIFI / ENABLE_NTP guard fixes so non-networked builds compile.

December 2025

~50 commits on main, 2025-12-01 … 2025-12-31.

New

  • HUB75: horizontal scrolling for long effect titles; QRCode + UrlEncode support.
  • Decoupled EFFECTS_MATRIX from the SmartMatrix dependency; single graphics_lib build expansion; nightdriver_client added with auto-brightness and gain for dim displays.
  • Better serial-port interactivity + enhanced CLI debugger; MeteorEffect refactored to a modern struct-of-arrays.

Fixed

  • StarEffect works with silent/no-audio; FillGetNoise scaling/centering on non-square matrices; GCC 14 map-allocator constness; Apple5x7 font linker error; merged ESP-IDF4/5 audio layers.

November 2025

2 commits on main, 2025-11-01 … 2025-11-30.

  • Quiet month — a dependency bump (js-yaml). (The v1.3.0 tag was cut from a late-November commit but published in January.)

October 2025

2 commits on main, 2025-10-01 … 2025-10-31.

  • Quiet month — a dependency bump (vite).

September 2025

~35 commits on main, 2025-09-01 … 2025-09-30.

New

  • Effect visualizer synced to effect output with improved FPS calculation; unified effects between Mesmerizer and M5StackDemo; Spectrum2 build uses the full matrix effects.
  • One bitmap shared across all snowflakes; GFX classes renamed; HUB75 now implies MATRIX.

Fixed

  • Dimension-overflow prevention; redundant-clear fix; toggle-button double-definition warnings; timezone file updates; release preparation.