Yesterday and today have been rather busy ref piMars. Yesterday I managed to streamline the time calculations to half the number of lines of code as well as take lots of pictures and screenshots for MagPi.

Today has been all about tweaking the configuration interface and adding features that might prove useful to someone. It looks a lot neater (and professional) now. I always find it is faster and more advatageous to worry about what the program looks like after the code is working properly.

The FTP library I was using - or one of the libraries it depended on - was using a deprecated function, and that was throwing warnings up everytime it was used. I found another FTP library that seemed lighter on the dependencies. It worked differently, so had to be recoded, but it works like a charm and without any warnings. \o/ yay!

It is necessary to fetch leap second bulletins from IERS, and this is done by FTP. However, many companies force ftp usage through a proxy, so I added a proxy option enabling the user to select the IP address and port for the proxy. This doesn't affect HTTP requests, which are needed to fetch down new (updated) mission files. These are easy enough to fetch and install manually if required.

In addition, I've set an option to change the window dimensions from 800×480 to something else. If you are using a different sized monitor, this will help to set the ideal size. Note that changing the size of the window can adversely affect the layout of skins, but if you need a full 1920×1080 window (or larger) then you'll probably have to make some skins yourself.

All changes made in the configuration screen can now be discarded by selecting the [ Abort ] button instead of saving. This includes undoing any deletions from the locations database. In addition, instead of forcing the main code to re-read the configuration file, the data is sent via a pipe - one less time the SD card gets read!