Procedure for testing an alpha release

mike_b

Hi everyone, I’m looking to test the latest 3.6.0-alpha release and would appreciate any general advice from the community on how to do this properly. I want to avoid making any mistakes and thus causing unnecessary work for the developers.

For context, my setup:

two Mini5+ boards (the first as the main board and the second as an expansion)
one 1LC toolboard, and
all in SBC mode.

When I tested the 3.5.3-beta release, I followed the official procedures by switching to the unstable repo, modifying /etc/apt/sources.list.d/duet3d.list, and then running sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade.

However, I'm unsure about the correct steps for testing the -alpha release. Should I simply download the firmware files to the SBC and the expansion board's SD card? And if I do that, will I also need to update the Duet Control Server or Duet Web Server as part of the process? Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I edited the duet3d.list file to point to unstable-3.6 but running apt list -a duetruntime seems like only 3.6.0~alpha.2 is available:

$ sudo apt list --upgradable
Listing... Done
duetcontrolserver/unstable-3.6 3.6.0~alpha.2 arm64 [upgradable from: 3.5.3~rc.1]
duetpimanagementplugin/unstable-3.6 3.6.0~alpha.2 arm64 [upgradable from: 3.5.3~rc.1]
duetpluginservice/unstable-3.6 3.6.0~alpha.2 arm64 [upgradable from: 3.5.3~rc.1]
duetruntime/unstable-3.6 3.6.0~alpha.2 arm64 [upgradable from: 3.5.3~rc.1]
duetsoftwareframework/unstable-3.6 3.6.0~alpha.2 arm64 [upgradable from: 3.5.3~rc.1]
duettools/unstable-3.6 3.6.0~alpha.2 arm64 [upgradable from: 3.5.3~rc.1]
duetwebcontrol/unstable-3.6 3.6.0~alpha.2 all [upgradable from: 3.5.3~rc.1]
duetwebserver/unstable-3.6 3.6.0~alpha.2 arm64 [upgradable from: 3.5.3~rc.1]
libcamera-ipa/stable 0.3.1+rpt20240906-1 arm64 [upgradable from: 0.3.1+rpt20240829-1]
libcamera-tools/stable 0.3.1+rpt20240906-1 arm64 [upgradable from: 0.3.1+rpt20240829-1]
libcamera0.3/stable 0.3.1+rpt20240906-1 arm64 [upgradable from: 0.3.1+rpt20240829-1]
reprapfirmware/unstable-3.6,unstable-3.6 3.6.0~alpha.2-3 all [upgradable from: 3.5.3~rc.1-1]

jay_s_uk

@mike_b alpha 2 is the latest DSF firmware available. AFAIK it's fully compatible with alpha 5.1 so you can upgrade to alpha 2 and then upload the firmware files for 5.1

mike_b

Hey @jay_s_uk, awesome, it worked, thanks for your help!