Kiln v0.7.3: Usability, Ledger, and Protocol Improvements

Version 0.7.3 of Kiln is now available! This will be our last release of 2019, and it is full of mostly minor changes. Most notably:

• New 'Ledger Disconnected' Notification
• Usability Improvements
• Post-Babylon Clean Up

Ledger Improvements

Kiln now notifies if your ledger device is disconnected! We've also added a status icon to the header which reports your connection status.

The icon in the top right always lets you know if your Ledger device is connected or not.

Ledger connectivity, particularly after voting or otherwise leaving the Baking app, is the most commonly reported issue. This notification will help combat this problem and dive deeper into diagnosing the issue. It is also helpful for dealing with curious cats who decide to hit ledger devices or gnaw on cables!

We've also updated the udev rules that our Debian distribution configures on your machine to be compatible with Ledger firmware 1.6.0. This configuration was updated with their firmware release, so this update makes sure the full stack of software remains compatible without any need for manual intervention.

Usability

We've listened to user suggestions and made several improvements!

Refined 'New Version of Tezos Available' Notification

The 'New Tezos software” notification has been updated so checks if individual monitored nodes aren't running the latest version of Tezos. This means bakers who are only running a Kiln Node won't get a notification to upgrade since they can't do it on their own. Bakers running many monitored nodes will see exactly which nodes of theirs need upgrading!

The two nodes on the right are running the latest version of Tezos, while the node on the left is not.

Gathering Baker Data...

When you add a baker to Kiln, it begins asking the blockchain about all the information it can get about your baker. That includes its baking history (what blocks have you baked, if any?) and baking rights (what blocks are you supposed to bake? Which blocks were you supposed to bake?). There were some cases where Kiln would report that it was “Gathering baker data' even though it had already retrieved all available information. This has been fixed!

Snapshot Imports can be cancelled

If a snapshot import ran into an issue or was simply taking too long, there was no way to exit out and you could get stuck in a bad state. That's alleviated now that snapshot imports can be cancelled!

New bip-ed25519 Derivation Scheme Baking Support

A few months ago we announced support for an improved bip-ed25519 derivation scheme in the Tezos protocol and on Ledger devices. You can now bake with that derivation scheme on Kiln! To see which addresses Kiln finds with on this new derivation scheme, you can hover over addresses to see the curve and path used to generate each address.

Hovering over a PKH will tell you the signing curve and derivation path used to generate it.

Mac Support

If you have the Nix Package Manager installed, you can now build Kiln from source on MacOS! Just don't try on Catalina, as nix is not currently supported on that operating system. This is not recommended for your average user, as it is a more technical process than nicely packaged version of Kiln, such as our debian package for Ubuntu.

Unfortunately this is the only update we can provide regarding Mac support at this time. Due to shifting priorities, we will not be releasing a distribution of Kiln for mac in 2019, but we hope to in 2020.

Post-Babylon Clean Up

Leading up to Babylon, we made several improvements to the core logic that handles block data and node RPC communications. Written in Haskell, we've moved this logic to a separate project that anyone can use for their own Tezos projects! We've already used it on several and we've received a merge request from the community, too!

We've also disabled support for the alphanet test network and instead now support babylonnet, however Carthagenet is not yet supported. We've also removed the Tzscan Public Node and updated block hash links so they now point to tzstats.com.

Questions? Encountered a bug? Email us at tezos@obsidian.systems, tweet us @obsidian_llc, join our slack group (just ask for an invite), or post your question on Tezos Stack Exchange! We'd love to hear from you.