Leica M11 Firmware V 1.6: GPS acquisition and bug fixes

[elmars]

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vor 55 Minuten schrieb LikameLeica:

 This is no longer using Bluetooth, this is now using wifi.  

It is using Bluetooth. Performance means "WiFi ready". The WiFi module of is started which spares a few seconds if You want to connect the camera to the App.

With an active WiFi connection You can do all operations (download photos, remote control etc). With WiFi ready (Performance) an active WiFi connection is established quicker. With Bluetooth only (Eco) only geo information is transferred to the camera.

[LikameLeica]

1 hour ago, elmars said:

It is using Bluetooth. Performance means "WiFi ready". The WiFi module of is started which spares a few seconds if You want to connect the camera to the App.

With an active WiFi connection You can do all operations (download photos, remote control etc). With WiFi ready (Performance) an active WiFi connection is established quicker. With Bluetooth only (Eco) only geo information is transferred to the camera.

Interesting that with the settings that I indicated in my original post my iPhone Bluetooth Connection does not show M11 Connected.  

Only when I open the Foto app and then also connect to the M11.

Edited December 16, 2022 by LikameLeica

[elmars]

vor 1 Stunde schrieb ELAN:

Hey Scott. Try this: in Eco mode take a few photos at home and let both your M11 and iPad fall asleep.  Get in a car and drive a few miles to a scenic spot. Wake up the camera and take a quick snap, photo #1. Don’t touch your iPad. Wait a minute and take photo #2. Drive back home and don’t touch the camera and iPad. At home wake up the camera and take a quick snap, photo #3. Wait a minute and take phone #4.  Reviewing your photos you’ll see these locations:  

Photo #1:  home location (wrong)

Photo #2:  scenic spot (correct)

Photo #3:  scenic spot (wrong)

Photo #4:  home (correct) 

I happen to develop apps that make use of iOS Location Services API so I know how Geo-tagging works from the iOS point of view: when an iOS app (like FOTOS) asks for the current location iOS immediately returns its last known location along with its accuracy and timestamp. If the iPhone was asleep and idle in your pocket for a while the last known location may be many minutes old and up to ~2km inaccurate.  In order not to fire up the power-hungry GPS radios iOS initiates multiple low-power methods (cellular triangulation, known WiFi APs, BT beacons, etc) to acquire an approximate location in the background using as little battery as possible. Sometimes this location is quite accurate and other times it’s off by a mile or two.  

This is the best location FOTOS can immediately receive from iOS after establishing the BT connection.  FOTOS can now ask iOS for the exact location. iOS will turn on its power hungry GPS chip and starts acquiring GPS signals from multiple satellites. Under the clear sky the iPhone will have a decent fix of ~250 meters accuracy within 5 seconds. It can take up to a minute to receive a location accurate to 5 or 10 meters.  

So the discussion should be how to handle the gap of time between when the camera awakes and starts making images, and when the accurate GPS fix arrives from the iPhone.  I believe that the current implementation in firmware 1.6 of writing the location of the last photo is totally wrong. An image should not have a location that is many miles away.  

I would like to see it implemented as follows:  Upon camera wake-up there’s the first few seconds to make the BT connection and receive the last known location.  During those first seconds nothing at all should be written for location data because the camera has no idea of where it is.  Writing nothing is better than writing a totally incorrect location! 

After connection is established we have an approx location. If it’s accurate enough (say within 250 meter) then write it to the image. Otherwise wait a few more seconds for an accurate location to arrive.   When a very accurate location finally arrives (within a minute of waking up) the firmware can go back to the first images taken after waking up and update their location data**.  This way our images have the best location possible and the location is never off by miles.  

** I don’t know how tricky it is for Leica to update metadata of an image that has already been digitized. 

This is very interesting, thank you very much!

Nevertheless, an ambiguity remains with me: I know people who have always taken a photo with the iPhone and one with the M11 in parallel. The positioning of the iPhone was always very precise, that of the M11 often (not always) less precise. I have seen the corresponding maps. According to your description of how the iPhone works, shouldn't the M11 also deliver the exact geodata to the M11? I would understand if that was not the case in which the iPhone is only in the pocket. But here it was active.

[ELAN]

3 minutes ago, elmars said:

This is very interesting, thank you very much!

Nevertheless, an ambiguity remains with me: I know people who have always taken a photo with the iPhone and one with the M11 in parallel. The positioning of the iPhone was always very precise, that of the M11 often (not always) less precise. I have seen the corresponding maps. According to your description of how the iPhone works, shouldn't the M11 also deliver the exact geodata to the M11? I would understand if that was not the case in which the iPhone is only in the pocket. But here it was active.

I suspect that FOTOS waits for iOS to signal that its request for a fresh, accurate GPS fix has arrived.  Until then FOTOS ignores the (approx) GPS fixes it receives and uses the location it received when it took the last photo (could be hours ago).  If you wait for a minute after the camera has woken up (two minutes indoors) I believe that photos taken with the iPhone and M11 will show the same exact location.

[elmars]

vor 46 Minuten schrieb LikameLeica:

Interesting that with the settings that I indicated in my original post my iPhone Bluetooth Connection does not show M11 Connected.  

Only when I open the Foto app and then also connect to the M11.

Bluetooth runs in the background. This is probably called low energy bluetooth. In the Bluetooth settings, this is not displayed as "connected". 

[scott kirkpatrick]

You are sensitive to the issues that make this so complicated to test.  I've worked with Android measurement apps that could be told to wake up and add to their logs whenever the phone position had changed by 10 meters (this was roughly 2015-2017 time frame).  So the first question is whether Fotos cares about correcting for movement or just uses a timer.  Your experiment suggests that it is not monitoring movement, and that it is not post-correcting a picture -- whatever it does, it does it before the shutter is pressed. That makes sense to me as the pipeline that starts flowing once you take each picture is really full, and correcting something would be nearly impossible while the next picture is also being worked on.

I don't use an iPhone (Android is open sourced, sort-of!) but have several Apple tablets.  Do the tablet apps differ from the phone apps in significant ways?  I still do not see an Android upgrade to Foptos, and there are signs that these two apps are the work of separate teams. 

 

Edited December 16, 2022 by scott kirkpatrick

[SrMi]

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57 minutes ago, scott kirkpatrick said:

<snip>

I don't use an iPhone (Android is open sourced, sort-of!) but have several Apple tablets.  Do the tablet apps differ from the phone apps in significant ways?  I still do not see an Android upgrade to Foptos, and there are signs that these two apps are the work of separate teams. 

The Android version of Fotos has been upgraded as well (3.3.0). Both Android and iOS versions were tested and launched at the same time.

[scott kirkpatrick]

7 hours ago, ELAN said:

** I don’t know how tricky it is for Leica to update metadata of an image that has already been digitized. 

I think the important distinction for the camera is between things written to the buffer RAM and data that has been written to the SD card.  I don't expect the camera to ever change data on the card once it has been written.  That means that location and time information should stay unchanged once written out.  I can't think of any counterexamples.  Can you?

[scott kirkpatrick]

15 minutes ago, SrMi said:

The Android version of Fotos has been upgraded as well (3.3.0). Both Android and iOS versions were tested and launched at the same time.

Yes.  My phone updated without any intervention on my part.  Probably last night.  Previously it didn't seem to want to talk to the M11 in ECO mode.  But I just tried with the camera in Performance mode, and it still does not respond to small distance changes.  Still thinks it is at my desk.

[ELAN]

16 minutes ago, scott kirkpatrick said:

I don't expect the camera to ever change data on the card once it has been written.  That means that location and time information should stay unchanged once written out.  I can't think of any counterexamples.  Can you?

I don’t know. I can’t think of a scenario where I’ve known a digital Leica to update files already written to disk. Probably not trivial to implement, which is why I brought it up. 

We will likely have to live with inaccurate (or missing) location data for photos taken just after the camera wakes up. 

[baimaomi]

On 12/14/2022 at 1:42 PM, fil-m said:

Hi. In fact I just figured out what could be the problem. Usually I keep C1 running in the background all the time. Now this is what I see in terms of behaviour, which could have changed when I upgraded to C1 v23 and /or the M11 FW 1.6

- When C1 (v23) is running and I connect the camera it takes control of the cam. I can even see the camera live view in C1 and take snapshots from the app (though I could not see where the captured image is stored)

- In that case the MacOS Image capture does not work as I explained earlier

- If I exit C1 then yes, Image Capture works again as usual and as expected!

Which means that Image Capture only works if C1 is not running 

So it looks to me like an interaction problem between the M11, C1 and Image Capture which could have happened due to a version upgrade (C1 and/or the M11 fw). In any case I am quite tired of all the tests, I will try to validate the above tomorrow.

Android Transfer does not connect to the cam (error message) but it could also be an interaction problem.

Thanks

Amazing, that turned out to be the exact issue I was having too. Thanks for posting!

[Wandering Photographer]

On 12/13/2022 at 10:43 PM, Wandering Photographer said:

The updated Fotos software for the iPhone changed my North Latitude, West Longitude to South Latitude and East Longitude.  Which causes my photos taken with my M10-R, in the Mid Atlantic States in the U.S. to be geolocated in Western Indian Ocean. The older version that was on my iPad gives the correct signs for the Latitude and Longitude.  -- This is for photos taken with my M10-R with the Visoflex GPS. I am concerned that the M11 firmware and Fotos software have flipped the convention from the M10-R and am reluctant to upgrade the M11 firmware until I have some confidence that the geotagged data from the M10-R and M11 will both be correctly handled by Fotos and other software.

Leica has confirmed it is a Fotos display problem. The GPS data is correct. They will presumably fix Fotos at some point in the near future.

[MrPaulK]

In IOS background apps get position updates only intermittently, it isn't a constant stream. This is to reduce battery load. The updates are actually "batched" so that a single reading can go to multiple applications. A foreground app which is actively requesting the location *right now* will get the location to much better accuracy. I don't know if fotos is more accurate if it  is running in the foreground, but it still might not be as its bit that services the camera is probably still running in a more 'background' mode.

[Ricard0]

Have I bricked my new M11?   In my haste to get the camera set up, I forgot to format the SD card in the M11 (card came from my M10M) and when I tried to run the firmware update using FOTOS, the camera seems to be stuck at "Firmware update in progress..."  It has been sitting at that screen for over 15 minutes.

FYI, FOTOS was connected to the camera via WiFi, not the cable.  Was that my error?   FOTOS disconnected and now I cannot get it to connect to the camera.  I'm afraid the only thing I can do is turn the camera off and back on and hope for the best.

Anyone else have similar issues?  Any suggestions?

(edited for clarity)

 

UPDATE:  After waiting over an hour I pulled the battery and, fingers crossed, restarted the camera.  It came back on with the previous firmware (1.5) still installed.  Whew!

I decided to take the old SAFE manual approach to updating the firmware and the update was successful.

 

Now THAT was a stressful evening!

Edited December 22, 2022 by Ricard0

[Wandering Photographer]

I always use a memory card freshly formatted in the camera as the destination of a firmware upgrade. Then put it in the camera for the upgrade. I tried using Fotos about a year ago to update my M10-R and it didn’t go. YMMD.

[Wandering Photographer]

On 12/26/2022 at 6:38 PM, RMeier said:

On 12/20/2022 at 1:35 AM, Wandering Photographer said:

Leica has confirmed it is a Fotos display problem. The GPS data is correct. They will presumably fix Fotos at some point in the near future.

Fotos version 3.3.1 still does not apply the correct sign to Latitude and Longitude in North America. The data is correct in the image file and is correctly mapped in other applications like Light Room.

Edited December 30, 2022 by Wandering Photographer

[LeicaS2]

On 12/13/2022 at 6:29 AM, Photoworks said:

It is nice to see that HSS has been added to the Profoto trigger for M11 in FW 16.

There is still no good option to get the Godox Trigger to work on M11.

I now have the Profoto Connect Pro for Leica. It is not working on the M11. Works fine on my M10 Reporter and my S (007).

I have just asked Profoto if they have others experiencing the problem.

Jack

[LeicaS2]

Profoto replied “ not yet for the M11” firmware yet to come.

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[Alexis M]

Still trying to fix my freeze of M11. Already installed 1.6 but want to try to re-install. How can I do that?

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[Photoworks]

1 hour ago, Alexis M said:

Still trying to fix my freeze of M11. Already installed 1.6 but want to try to re-install. How can I do that?

IS the profoto freezing the M11? it should only work with single pin at the moment