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We are pleased to announce that Azure Sphere 20.01 OS is now available via the Retail feed. This release includes several new features and enhancements to further strengthen defense-in-depth for devices at customer sites and to ensure supportability at scale. Thank you for your support in Public Preview and for helping us deliver a great product.
How to get the 20.01 release
If your devices are connected to the internet, they should receive the OS update from the cloud. However, if you have an older Seeed MT3620 Development Kit that has not been used, you might need to update manually, as described in Update the OS on an early dev kit.
After your devices receive the 20.01 OS, they will be unable to recover or roll back to an earlier Preview release. See Return to earlier Public Preview versions unavailable for more information.
Earlier versions of the SDK do not work with the 20.01 release and may return `Unexpected error` or a similar message. To update to the latest SDK, download and install the latest version for Windows or Linux.
If you installed the 20.01 evaluation SDK during the Retail Evaluation period, you must now install the final SDK so that you can use new features.
Although our goal is to avoid the introduction of breaking changes and incompatibility between releases, in a few situations, action may be required to ensure that your devices and applications continue to work as intended. Please see What’s New in the online documentation to learn about changes that might affect you.
What's new in the 20.01 release
The 20.01 release of Azure Sphere includes new features to support power management, error reporting, and to provide better management of data returned by the Azure Sphere Security Service. In addition, this release incorporates enhancements to the OS and SDK to further strengthen the security of devices at customer sites and ensure supportability.
Tighter security for deployed devices
Connected device manufacturers and OEMs can disable computer-to-device communications to prevent unauthorized or malicious use by those who have physical access to the device.
Disabling such access is part of device finalization. Finalization is typically performed on the factory floor before the connected device manufacturer ships their product to an end user site, but some dev kit manufacturers may finalize devices as well. After finalization, a user will be able to get the device ID over computer-to-device connection, but all other operations require a device capability.
Field support technicians who need computer-to-device communications for set-up and servicing can download the fieldServicing device capability. Using this capability, a technician can create a servicing session that provides temporary access from a computer. For application developers, the azsphere device enable-development command (which applies the appDevelopment capability) will continue to work as in preview releases.
Power management API
This release includes a new power management API, which enables applications to put the device into the power-down state. See Manage Power Down state for Azure Sphere devices for an overview of its use and Powerdown in the Azure Sphere Samples repo on GitHub for a sample application.
Error reporting
You can now download data about errors and other events that affect your devices by using the azsphere tenant download-error-report command. The downloaded information contains data for all devices in a tenant and can be viewed with Excel or other tools. See Collect and interpret error data for details.
Paged display of device information
The Azure Sphere CLI now supports paging for commands that return large amounts of data. This feature is useful for gathering information about tenants that contain many devices. Display device information describes how to use this feature.